IMPContact: An Interhelical Residue Contact Prediction Method

Abstract

As an important category of proteins, alpha-helix transmembrane proteins (TMPs) play an important role in various biological activities. Because the solved TMP structures are inadequate, predicting the residue contacts among the transmembrane segments of an TMP exhibits the basis of protein fold, which can be used to further discover more protein functions. A few efforts have been devoted to predict the interhelical residue contact using machine learning methods based on the prior knowledge of transmembrane protein structure. However, it is still a challenge to improve the prediction accuracy, while the deep learning method provides an opportunity to utilize the structural knowledge in a different insight. For this purpose, we proposed a novel TMP residue-residue contact prediction method IMPContact, in which a convolutional neural network (CNN) was applied to recognize those interhelical contacts in a TMP using its specific structural features. There were four sequence-based TMP-specific features selected to descript a pair of residues, namely, evolutionary covariation, predicted topology structure, residue relative position, and evolutionary conservation. An up-to-date dataset was used to train and test the IMPContact; our method achieved better performance compared to peer methods. In the case studies, IHRCs in the regular transmembrane helixes were better predicted than in the irregular ones.