Author(s)

Lezheng Yu¹, Fengjuan Liu¹, Lixiao Du¹, Yizhou Li²

¹School of Chemistry and Life Science, Guizhou Education University, Guiyang, China.
²College of Chemistry, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China.

Protein secretion plays an important role in bacterial lifestyles. In Gram-negative bacteria, a wide range of proteins are secreted to modulate the interactions of bacteria with their environments and other bacteria via various secretion systems. These proteins are essential for the virulence of bacteria, so it is crucial to study them for the pathogenesis of diseases and the development of drugs. Using amino acid composition (AAC), position-specific scoring matrix (PSSM) and N-terminal signal peptides, two different substitution models are firstly constructed to transform protein sequences into numerical vectors. Then, based on support vector machine (SVM) and the “one to one” algorithm, a hybrid multi-classifier named SecretP v.2.2 is proposed to rapidly and accurately distinguish different types of Gram-negative bacterial secreted proteins. When performed on the same test set for a comparison with other methods, SecretP v.2.2 gets the highest total sensitivity of 93.60%. A public independent dataset is used to further test the power of SecretP v.2.2 for predicting NCSPs, it also yields satisfactory results.

Gram-Negative Bacteria, Secreted Protein, Position-Specific Scoring Matrix, Signal Peptide, Support Vector Machine

Yu, L. , Liu, F. , Du, L. and Li, Y. (2018) An Improved Approach for Rapidly Identifying Different Types of Gram-Negative Bacterial Secreted Proteins. Natural Science, 10, 168-177. doi: 10.4236/ns.2018.105018.