Prediction of detailed enzyme functions and identification of specificity determining residues by random forests

PLoS One. 2014 Jan 8;9(1):e84623. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0084623. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

Determining enzyme functions is essential for a thorough understanding of cellular processes. Although many prediction methods have been developed, it remains a significant challenge to predict enzyme functions at the fourth-digit level of the Enzyme Commission numbers. Functional specificity of enzymes often changes drastically by mutations of a small number of residues and therefore, information about these critical residues can potentially help discriminate detailed functions. However, because these residues must be identified by mutagenesis experiments, the available information is limited, and the lack of experimentally verified specificity determining residues (SDRs) has hindered the development of detailed function prediction methods and computational identification of SDRs. Here we present a novel method for predicting enzyme functions by random forests, EFPrf, along with a set of putative SDRs, the random forests derived SDRs (rf-SDRs). EFPrf consists of a set of binary predictors for enzymes in each CATH superfamily and the rf-SDRs are the residue positions corresponding to the most highly contributing attributes obtained from each predictor. EFPrf showed a precision of 0.98 and a recall of 0.89 in a cross-validated benchmark assessment. The rf-SDRs included many residues, whose importance for specificity had been validated experimentally. The analysis of the rf-SDRs revealed both a general tendency that functionally diverged superfamilies tend to include more active site residues in their rf-SDRs than in less diverged superfamilies, and superfamily-specific conservation patterns of each functional residue. EFPrf and the rf-SDRs will be an effective tool for annotating enzyme functions and for understanding how enzyme functions have diverged within each superfamily.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Artificial Intelligence*
  • Catalytic Domain
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Enzymes / chemistry*
  • Enzymes / metabolism*
  • Models, Molecular
  • Substrate Specificity

Substances

  • Enzymes

Grants and funding

This study was supported by the Industrial Technology Research Grant Program in 2007 (grant number 07C46056a) from New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) of Japan, Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (grant numbers 25430186 and 25293079) and from the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare to K.M., and also by Grant-in-Aid for Publication of Scientific Research Results (grant numbers 238048 and 248047) from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) to N.N. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.