Biomedical subjects

Shiow-Fen Hwang

Publications and source records attributed to Shiow-Fen Hwang.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2007

SODOCK: swarm optimization for highly flexible protein-ligand docking.

Protein-ligand docking can be formulated as a parameter optimization problem associated with an accurate scoring function, which aims to identify the translation, orientation, and conformation of a docked ligand with the lowest energy. The parameter optimization problem for highly flexible ligands with many rotatable bonds is more difficult than that for less flexible ligands using genetic algorithm (GA)-based approaches, due to the large numbers of parameters and high correlations among these parameters. This investigation presents a novel optimization algorithm SODOCK based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) for solving flexible protein-ligand docking problems. To improve efficiency and robustness of PSO, an efficient local search strategy is incorporated into SODOCK. The implementation of SODOCK adopts the environment and energy function of AutoDock 3.05. Computer simulation results reveal that SODOCK is superior to the Lamarckian genetic algorithm (LGA) of AutoDock, in terms of convergence performance, robustness, and obtained energy, especially for highly flexible ligands. The results also reveal that PSO is more suitable than the conventional GA in dealing with flexible docking problems with high correlations among parameters. This investigation also compared SODOCK with four state-of-the-art docking methods, namely GOLD 1.2, DOCK 4.0, FlexX 1.8, and LGA of AutoDock 3.05. SODOCK obtained the smallest RMSD in 19 of 37 cases. The average 2.29 A of the 37 RMSD values of SODOCK was better than those of other docking programs, which were all above 3.0 A.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2006

Prediction of protein mutant stability using classification and regression tool.

Prediction of protein stability upon amino acid substitutions is an important problem in molecular biology and the solving of which would help for designing stable mutants. In this work, we have analyzed the stability of protein mutants using two different datasets of 1396 and 2204 mutants obtained from ProTherm database, respectively for free energy change due to thermal (DeltaDeltaG) and denaturant denaturations (DeltaDeltaG(H(2)O)). We have used a set of 48 physical, chemical energetic and conformational properties of amino acid residues and computed the difference of amino acid properties for each mutant in both sets of data. These differences in amino acid properties have been related to protein stability (DeltaDeltaG and DeltaDeltaG(H(2)O)) and are used to train with classification and regression tool for predicting the stability of protein mutants. Further, we have tested the method with 4 fold, 5 fold and 10 fold cross validation procedures. We found that the physical properties, shape and flexibility are important determinants of protein stability. The classification of mutants based on secondary structure (helix, strand, turn and coil) and solvent accessibility (buried, partially buried, partially exposed and exposed) distinguished the stabilizing/destabilizing mutants at an average accuracy of 81% and 80%, respectively for DeltaDeltaG and DeltaDeltaG(H(2)O). The correlation between the experimental and predicted stability change is 0.61 for DeltaDeltaG and 0.44 for DeltaDeltaG(H(2)O). Further, the free energy change due to the replacement of amino acid residue has been predicted within an average error of 1.08 kcal/mol and 1.37 kcal/mol for thermal and chemical denaturation, respectively. The relative importance of secondary structure and solvent accessibility, and the influence of the dataset on prediction of protein mutant stability have been discussed.

Amino Acid Substitution↗

PubMed2006

Accurate prediction of enzyme subfamily class using an adaptive fuzzy k-nearest neighbor method.

Amphiphilic pseudo-amino acid composition (Am-Pse-AAC) with extra sequence-order information is a useful feature for representing enzymes. This study first utilizes the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) rule to analyze the distribution of enzymes in the Am-Pse-AAC feature space. This analysis indicates the distributions of multiple classes of enzymes are highly overlapped. To cope with the overlap problem, this study proposes an efficient non-parametric classifier for predicting enzyme subfamily class using an adaptive fuzzy r-nearest neighbor (AFK-NN) method, where k and a fuzzy strength parameter m are adaptively specified. The fuzzy membership values of a query sample Q are dynamically determined according to the position of Q and its weighted distances to the k nearest neighbors. Using the same enzymes of the oxidoreductases family for comparisons, the prediction accuracy of AFK-NN is 76.6%, which is better than those of Support Vector Machine (73.6%), the decision tree method C5.0 (75.4%) and the existing covariant-discriminate algorithm (70.6%) using a jackknife test. To evaluate the generalization ability of AFK-NN, the datasets for all six families of entirely sequenced enzymes are established from the newly updated SWISS-PROT and ENZYME database. The accuracy of AFK-NN on the new large-scale dataset of oxidoreductases family is 83.3%, and the mean accuracy of the six families is 92.1%.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2006

Knowledge acquisition and development of accurate rules for predicting protein stability changes.

Knowing the mechanisms by which protein stability change is one of the most important and valuable tasks in molecular biology. The conventional methods of predicting protein stability changes mainly focus on improving prediction accuracy. However, it is desirable to extract domain knowledge from large databases that is beneficial to accurate prediction of the protein stability change. This paper presents an interpretable prediction tree method (named iPTREE) that produces explanatory rules to explore hidden knowledge accompanied with high prediction accuracy and consequently analyzes the factors influencing the protein stability changes. To evaluate iPTREE and the knowledge upon protein stability changes, a thermodynamic dataset consisting of 1615 mutants led by single point mutation from ProTherm is adopted. Being as a predictor for protein stability changes, the rule-based approach can achieve a prediction accuracy of 87%, which is better than other methods based on artificial neural networks (ANN) and support vector machines (SVM). Besides, these methods lack the ability in biological knowledge discovery. The human-interpretable rules produced by iPTREE reveal that temperature is a factor of concern in predicting protein stability changes. For example, one of interpretable rules with high support is as follows: if the introduced residue type is Alanine and temperature is between 4 degrees C and 40 degrees C, then the stability change will be negative (destabilizing). The present study demonstrates that iPTREE can easily be used in the application of protein stability changes where one requires more understandable knowledge.

Algorithms↗

PubMed1999

The hydrophobic heptad repeat in Region III of Escherichia coli transcription factor sigma 54 is essential for core RNA polymerase binding.

Escherichia coli transcription factor sigma 54 contains motifs that resemble closely those used for RNA polymerase II in mammalian cells, including two hydrophobic heptad repeats, a very acidic region and a glutamine-rich region. Triple changes in hydrophobic or multiple changes in acidic residues in Region III are known to severely impair core-binding ability. To investigate whether all the changes in triple mutants are necessary for core binding, site-directed mutagenesis was performed to create single and double mutants in the leucine or isoleucine residues in the heptad repeat in Region III. Single mutants showed no discernible loss of function. Double mutants showed partial protection of the -12 promoter element of the glnAp2 promoter due to the partial loss of their ability to bind core RNA polymerase. These mutations were deleterious to the function of sigma 54, which retained only 30-40% of wild-type mRNA levels. However, double mutants retained nearly normal ability to form open complexes. Two triple mutants created during previous work lost most, if not all, of their ability to bind core RNA polymerase, to protect the -12 promoter element of the glnAp2 promoter and to open the transcription start site. The two triple mutants produced about 20% or less than 10% of the wild-type transcripts from the glnAp2 promoter. These results demonstrate that the hydrophobic heptad repeat in Region III is essential for core RNA polymerase binding. Progressive loss of hydrophobicity of the hydrophobic heptad repeat in Region III of sigma 54 resulted in a progressive loss of core-binding ability, leading to the loss of -12 promoter element recognition and mRNA production.

Bacterial Proteins↗