SPalmitoylC-PseAAC: A sequence-based model developed via Chou's 5-steps rule and general PseAAC for identifying S-palmitoylation sites in proteins

Abstract

S-Palmitoylation is a uniquely reversible and biologically important post-translational modification as it plays an essential role in a variety of cellular processes including signal transduction, protein-membrane interactions, neuronal development, lipid raft targeting, subcellular localization and apoptosis. Due to its association with the neuronal development, it plays a pivotal role in a variety of neurodegenerative diseases, mainly Alzheimer's, Schizophrenia and Huntington's disease. It is also essential for developmental life cycles and pathogenesis of Toxoplasma gondii and Plasmodium falciparum, known to cause toxoplasmosis and malaria, respectively. This depicts the strong biological significance of S-Palmitoylation, thus, the timely and accurate identification of S-palmitoylation sites is crucial. Herein, we propose a predictor for S-Palmitoylation sites in proteins namely SPalmitoylC-PseAAC by integrating the Chou's Pseudo Amino Acid Composition (PseAAC) and relative/absolute position-based features. Self-consistency testing and 10-fold cross-validation are performed to evaluate the performance of SPalmitoylC-PseAAC, using accuracy metrics. For self-consistency testing, 99.79% Acc, 99.77% Sp, 99.80% Sn and 1.00 MCC was observed, whereas, for 10-fold cross validation 97.22% Acc, 98.85% Sp, 95.80% Sn and 0.94 MCC was observed. Thus the proposed predictor can help in predicting the palmitoylation sites in an efficient and accurate way. The SPalmitoylC-PseAAC is available at (biopred.org/palm).