DisoLipPred: accurate prediction of disordered lipid-binding residues in protein sequences with deep recurrent networks and transfer learning

Abstract

Abstract Motivation Intrinsically disordered protein regions interact with proteins, nucleic acids and lipids. Regions that bind lipids are implicated in a wide spectrum of cellular functions and several human diseases. Motivated by the growing amount of experimental data for these interactions and lack of tools that can predict them from the protein sequence, we develop DisoLipPred, the first predictor of the disordered lipid-binding residues (DLBRs). Results DisoLipPred relies on a deep bidirectional recurrent network that implements three innovative features: transfer learning, bypass module that sidesteps predictions for putative structured residues, and expanded inputs that cover physiochemical properties associated with the protein–lipid interactions. Ablation analysis shows that these features drive predictive quality of DisoLipPred. Tests on an independent test dataset and the yeast proteome reveal that DisoLipPred generates accurate results and that none of the related existing tools can be used to indirectly identify DLBR. We also show that DisoLipPred’s predictions complement the results generated by predictors of the transmembrane regions. Altogether, we conclude that DisoLipPred provides high-quality predictions of DLBRs that complement the currently available methods. Availability and implementation DisoLipPred’s webserver is available at http://biomine.cs.vcu.edu/servers/DisoLipPred/. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.