Identification of single-stranded and double-stranded dna binding proteins based on protein structure

Background: Protein-DNA interactions are essential for many biological processes. However, the structural mechanisms underlying these interactions are not fully understood. DNA binding proteins can be classified into double-stranded DNA binding proteins (DSBs) and single-stranded DNA binding proteins (SSBs), and they take part in different biological functions. DSBs usually act as transcriptional factors to regulate the genes' expressions, while SSBs usually play roles in DNA replication, recombination, and repair, etc. Understanding the binding specificity of a DNA binding protein is helpful for the research of protein functions. Results: In this paper, we investigated the differences between DSBs and SSBs on surface tunnels as well as the OB-fold domain information. We detected the largest clefts on the protein surfaces, to obtain several features to be used for distinguishing the potential interfaces between SSBs and DSBs, and compared its structure with each of the six OB-fold protein templates, and use the maximal alignment score TM-score as the OB-fold feature of the protein, based on which, we constructed the support vector machine (SVM) classification model to automatically distinguish these two kinds of proteins, with prediction accuracy of 87%, 83% and 83% for HOLO-set, APO-set and Mixed-set respectively. Conclusions: We found that they have different ranges of tunnel lengths and tunnel curvatures; moreover, the alignment results with OB-fold templates have also found to be the discriminative feature of SSBs and DSBs. Experimental results on 10-fold cross validation indicate that the new feature set are effective to describe DNA binding proteins. The evaluation results on both bound (DNA-bound) and non-bound (DNA-free) proteins have shown the satisfactory performance of our method.