A systematic identification of species-specific protein succinylation sites using joint element features information

Md Mehedi Hasan,1 Mst Shamima Khatun,2 Md Nurul Haque Mollah,2 Cao Yong,3 Dianjing Guo1 1School of Life Sciences and the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, New Territory, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China; 2Laboratory of Bioinformatics, Department of Statistics, University of Rajshahi, Rajshahi, Bangladesh; 3Department of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen Graduate School, Shenzhen, People’s Republic of China Abstract: Lysine succinylation, an important type of protein posttranslational modification, plays significant roles in many cellular processes. Accurate identification of succinylation sites can facilitate our understanding about the molecular mechanism and potential roles of lysine succinylation. However, even in well-studied systems, a majority of the succinylation sites remain undetected because the traditional experimental approaches to succinylation site identification are often costly, time-consuming, and laborious. In silico approach, on the other hand, is potentially an alternative strategy to predict succinylation substrates. In this paper, a novel computational predictor SuccinSite2.0 was developed for predicting generic and species-specific protein succinylation sites. This predictor takes the composition of profile-based amino acid and orthogonal binary features, which were used to train a random forest classifier. We demonstrated that the proposed SuccinSite2.0 predictor outperformed other currently existing implementations on a complementarily independent dataset. Furthermore, the important features that make visible contributions to species-specific and cross-species-specific prediction of protein succinylation site were analyzed. The proposed predictor is anticipated to be a useful computational resource for lysine succinylation site prediction. The integrated species-specific online tool of SuccinSite2.0 is publicly accessible. Keywords: posttranslation modification, succinylation site prediction, machine learning, sequence encoding, feature selectio