Ranking Gene Ontology terms for predicting non-classical secretory proteins in eukaryotes and prokaryotes

Protein secretion is an important biological process for both eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Several sequence-based methods mainly rely on utilizing various types of complementary features to design accurate classifiers for predicting non-classical secretory proteins. Gene Ontology (GO) terms are increasing informative in predicting protein functions. However, the number of used GO terms is often very large. For example, there are 60,020 GO terms used in the prediction method Euk-mPLoc 2.0 for subcellular localization. This study proposes a novel approach to identify a small set of m top-ranked GO terms served as the only type of input features to design a support vector machine (SVM) based method Sec-GO to predict non-classical secretory proteins in both eukaryotes and prokaryotes. To evaluate the Sec-GO method, two existing methods and their used datasets are adopted for performance comparisons. The Sec-GO method using m=436 GO terms yields an independent test accuracy of 96.7% on mammalian proteins, much better than the existing method SPRED (82.2%) which uses frequencies of tri-peptides and short peptides, secondary structure, and physicochemical properties as input features of a random forest classifier. Furthermore, when applying to Gram-positive bacterial proteins, the Sec-GO with m=158 GO terms has a test accuracy of 94.5%, superior to NClassG+ (90.0%) which uses SVM with several feature types, comprising amino acid composition, di-peptides, physicochemical properties and the position specific weighting matrix. Analysis of the distribution of secretory proteins in a GO database indicates the percentage of the non-classical secretory proteins annotated by GO is larger than that of classical secretory proteins in both eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Of the m top-ranked GO features, the top-four GO terms are all annotated by such subcellular locations as GO:0005576 (Extracellular region). Additionally, the method Sec-GO is easily implemented and its web tool of prediction is available at iclab.life.nctu.edu.tw/secgo.