Incorporating the Coevolving Information of Substrates in Predicting HIV-1 Protease Cleavage Sites

Human immunodeficiency virus 1 (HIV-1) protease (PR) plays a crucial role in the maturation of the virus. The study of substrate specificity of HIV-1 PR as a new endeavor strives to increase our ability to understand how HIV-1 PR recognizes its various cleavage sites. To predict HIV-1 PR cleavage sites, most of the existing approaches have been developed solely based on the homogeneity of substrate sequence information with supervised classification techniques. Although efficient, these approaches are found to be restricted to the ability of explaining their results and probably provide few insights into the mechanisms by which HIV-1 PR cleaves the substrates in a site-specific manner. In this work, a coevolutionary pattern-based prediction model for HIV-1 PR cleavage sites, namely EvoCleave, is proposed by integrating the coevolving information obtained from substrate sequences with a linear SVM classifier. The experiment results showed that EvoCleave yielded a very promising performance in terms of ROC analysis and f-measure. We also prospectively assessed the biological significance of coevolutionary patterns by applying them to study three fundamental issues of HIV-1 PR cleavage site. The analysis results demonstrated that the coevolutionary patterns offered valuable insights into the understanding of substrate specificity of HIV-1 PR.