SCOT: Rethinking the classification of secondary structure elements

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (8) ◽  
pp. 2417-2428
Author(s):  
Tobias Brinkjost ◽  
Christiane Ehrt ◽  
Oliver Koch ◽  
Petra Mutzel

Abstract Motivation Secondary structure classification is one of the most important issues in structure-based analyses due to its impact on secondary structure prediction, structural alignment and protein visualization. There are still open challenges concerning helix and sheet assignments which are currently not addressed by a single multi-purpose software. Results We introduce SCOT (Secondary structure Classification On Turns) as a novel secondary structure element assignment software which supports the assignment of turns, right-handed α-, 310- and π-helices, left-handed α- and 310-helices, 2.27- and polyproline II helices, β-sheets and kinks. We demonstrate that the introduction of helix Purity values enables a clear differentiation between helix classes. SCOT’s unique strengths are highlighted by comparing it to six state-of-the-art methods (DSSP, STRIDE, ASSP, SEGNO, DISICL and SHAFT). The assignment approaches were compared concerning geometric consistency, protein structure quality and flexibility dependency and their impact on secondary structure element-based structural alignments. We show that only SCOT’s combination of hydrogen bonds, geometric criteria and dihedral angles enables robust assignments independent of the structure quality and flexibility. We demonstrate that this combination and the elaborate kink detection lead to SCOT’s clear superiority for protein alignments. As the resulting helices and strands are provided in a PDB conform output format, they can immediately be used for structure alignment algorithms. Taken together, the application of our new method and the straight-forward visualization using the accompanying PyMOL scripts enable the comprehensive analysis of regular backbone geometries in proteins. Availability and implementation https://this-group.rocks Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (20) ◽  
pp. 5021-5026 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gang Xu ◽  
Qinghua Wang ◽  
Jianpeng Ma

Abstract Motivation Predictions of protein backbone torsion angles (ϕ and ψ) and secondary structure from sequence are crucial subproblems in protein structure prediction. With the development of deep learning approaches, their accuracies have been significantly improved. To capture the long-range interactions, most studies integrate bidirectional recurrent neural networks into their models. In this study, we introduce and modify a recently proposed architecture named Transformer to capture the interactions between the two residues theoretically with arbitrary distance. Moreover, we take advantage of multitask learning to improve the generalization of neural network by introducing related tasks into the training process. Similar to many previous studies, OPUS-TASS uses an ensemble of models and achieves better results. Results OPUS-TASS uses the same training and validation sets as SPOT-1D. We compare the performance of OPUS-TASS and SPOT-1D on TEST2016 (1213 proteins) and TEST2018 (250 proteins) proposed in the SPOT-1D paper, CASP12 (55 proteins), CASP13 (32 proteins) and CASP-FM (56 proteins) proposed in the SAINT paper, and a recently released PDB structure collection from CAMEO (93 proteins) named as CAMEO93. On these six test sets, OPUS-TASS achieves consistent improvements in both backbone torsion angles prediction and secondary structure prediction. On CAMEO93, SPOT-1D achieves the mean absolute errors of 16.89 and 23.02 for ϕ and ψ predictions, respectively, and the accuracies for 3- and 8-state secondary structure predictions are 87.72 and 77.15%, respectively. In comparison, OPUS-TASS achieves 16.56 and 22.56 for ϕ and ψ predictions, and 89.06 and 78.87% for 3- and 8-state secondary structure predictions, respectively. In particular, after using our torsion angles refinement method OPUS-Refine as the post-processing procedure for OPUS-TASS, the mean absolute errors for final ϕ and ψ predictions are further decreased to 16.28 and 21.98, respectively. Availability and implementation The training and the inference codes of OPUS-TASS and its data are available at https://github.com/thuxugang/opus_tass. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


Author(s):  
Fabian Sievers ◽  
Desmond G Higgins

Abstract Motivation Secondary structure prediction accuracy (SSPA) in the QuanTest benchmark can be used to measure accuracy of a multiple sequence alignment. SSPA correlates well with the sum-of-pairs score, if the results are averaged over many alignments but not on an alignment-by-alignment basis. This is due to a sub-optimal selection of reference and non-reference sequences in QuanTest. Results We develop an improved strategy for selecting reference and non-reference sequences for a new benchmark, QuanTest2. In QuanTest2, SSPA and SP correlate better on an alignment-by-alignment basis than in QuanTest. Guide-trees for QuanTest2 are more balanced with respect to reference sequences than in QuanTest. QuanTest2 scores correlate well with other well-established benchmarks. Availability and implementation QuanTest2 is available at http://bioinf.ucd.ie/quantest2.tar, comprises of reference and non-reference sequence sets and a scoring script. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (12) ◽  
pp. 3733-3738
Author(s):  
Tomer Sidi ◽  
Chen Keasar

Abstract Motivation The Protein Data Bank (PDB), the ultimate source for data in structural biology, is inherently imbalanced. To alleviate biases, virtually all structural biology studies use nonredundant (NR) subsets of the PDB, which include only a fraction of the available data. An alternative approach, dubbed redundancy-weighting (RW), down-weights redundant entries rather than discarding them. This approach may be particularly helpful for machine-learning (ML) methods that use the PDB as their source for data. Methods for secondary structure prediction (SSP) have greatly improved over the years with recent studies achieving above 70% accuracy for eight-class (DSSP) prediction. As these methods typically incorporate ML techniques, training on RW datasets might improve accuracy, as well as pave the way toward larger and more informative secondary structure classes. Results This study compares the SSP performances of deep-learning models trained on either RW or NR datasets. We show that training on RW sets consistently results in better prediction of 3- (HCE), 8- (DSSP) and 13-class (STR2) secondary structures. Availability and implementation The ML models, the datasets used for their derivation and testing, and a stand-alone SSP program for DSSP and STR2 predictions, are freely available under LGPL license in http://meshi1.cs.bgu.ac.il/rw. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (23) ◽  
pp. 3058-3065 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jana Sperschneider ◽  
Amitava Datta ◽  
Michael J. Wise

Abstract Motivation Laboratory RNA structure determination is demanding and costly and thus, computational structure prediction is an important task. Single sequence methods for RNA secondary structure prediction are limited by the accuracy of the underlying folding model, if a structure is supported by a family of evolutionarily related sequences, one can be more confident that the prediction is accurate. RNA pseudoknots are functional elements, which have highly conserved structures. However, few comparative structure prediction methods can handle pseudoknots due to the computational complexity. Results A comparative pseudoknot prediction method called DotKnot-PW is introduced based on structural comparison of secondary structure elements and H-type pseudoknot candidates. DotKnot-PW outperforms other methods from the literature on a hand-curated test set of RNA structures with experimental support. Availability DotKnot-PW and the RNA structure test set are available at the web site http://dotknot.csse.uwa.edu.au/pw. Contact [email protected] Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


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