Exploiting structural and topological information to improve prediction of RNA-protein binding sites

Background: RNA-protein interactions are important for a wide range of biological processes. Current computational methods to predict interacting residues in RNA-protein interfaces predominately rely on sequence data. It is, however, known that interface residue propensity is closely correlated with structural properties. In this paper we systematically study information obtained from sequences and structures and compare their contributions in this prediction problem. Particularly, different geometrical and network topological properties of protein structures are evaluated to improve interface residue prediction accuracy. Results: We have quantified the impact of structural information on the prediction accuracy in comparison to the purely sequence based approach using two machine learning techniques: Naive Bayes classifiers and Support Vector Machines. The highest AUC of 0.83 was achieved by a Support Vector Machine, exploiting PSI-BLAST profile, accessible surface area, betweenness-centrality and retention coefficient as input features. Taking into account that our results are based on a larger non-redundant data set, the prediction accuracy is considerably higher than reported in previous, comparable studies. A protein-RNA interface predictor (PRIP) and the data set have been made available at http://www.qfab.org/PRIP. Conclusion: Graph-theoretic properties of residue contact maps derived from protein structures such as betweenness-centrality can supplement sequence or structure features to improve the prediction accuracy for binding residues in RNA-protein interactions. While Support Vector Machines perform better on this task, Naive Bayes classifiers also have been found to achieve good prediction accuracies but require much less training time and are an attractive choice for large scale predictions.