Prediction of phosphothreonine sites in human proteins by fusing different features

Abstract

Phosphorylation is one of the most important protein post-translation modifications. With the rapid development of high-throughput mass spectrometry, phosphorylation site data is rapidly accumulating, which provides us an opportunity to systematically investigate and predict phosphorylation in proteins. The phosphorylation of threonine is the addition of a phosphoryl group to its polar side chains group. In this work, we statistically analyzed the distribution of the different properties including position conservation, secondary structure, accessibility and some other physicochemical properties of the residues surrounding the phosphothreonine site and non-phosphothreonine site. We found that the distributions of those features are non-symmetrical. Based on the distribution of properties, we developed a new model by using optimal window size strategy and feature selection technique. The cross-validated results show that the area under receiver operating characteristic curve reaches to 0.847, suggesting that our model may play a complementary role to other existing methods for predicting phosphothreonine site in proteins.