Prediction of operator-binding protein by discriminant analysis

A number of operator-binding proteins contain similar sequence features to Cro and cI repressors of bacteriophage and CAP protein of Escherichia coli, such as conserved amino acids at constant positions. However, these sequence patterns also occur in proteins that are not operator-binding. We use sequence analogy information in conjunction with a pattern recognition algorithm. The functional and structural properties, e.g., distributions of hydrophobicity, hydrophilicity, charged amino acids, electrostatic free energy, and helical structures of protein are also considered. Within the framework of discriminant analysis, we calculate the above variables and search for a better combination of variables. To assess the discriminatory power of these variables, we allocated additional sequences and predict DNA-binding regions of regulatory proteins not included in the training set.