Prediction of multi-type membrane proteins in human by an integrated approach

Membrane proteins were found to be involved in various cellular processes performing various important functions, which are mainly associated to their types. However, it is very time-consuming and expensive for traditional biophysical methods to identify membrane protein types. Although some computational tools predicting membrane protein types have been developed, most of them can only recognize one kind of type. Therefore, they are not as effective as one membrane protein can have several types at the same time. To our knowledge, few methods handling multiple types of membrane proteins were reported. In this study, we proposed an integrated approach to predict multiple types of membrane proteins by employing sequence homology and protein-protein interaction network. As a result, the prediction accuracies reached 87.65%, 81.39% and 70.79%, respectively, by the leave-one-out test on three datasets. It outperformed the nearest neighbor algorithm adopting pseudo amino acid composition. The method is anticipated to be an alternative tool for identifying membrane protein types. New metrics for evaluating performances of methods dealing with multi-label problems were also presented. The program of the method is available upon request.