Identifying residues that determine palmitoylation using association rule mining

Abstract

Abstract Motivation In eukaryotes, palmitoylation drives several essential cellular mechanisms like protein sorting, protein stability and protein–protein interaction. Several amino acids namely Cys, Gly, Ser, Thr and Lys undergo palmitoylation. But very little is known about the amino acid patterns that promote palmitoylation. Results We deduced presence of statistically significant amino acids around palmitoylation sites and their association with different palmitoylated residues i.e. Cys, Gly and Ser. The results suggest that palmitoylation, irrespective of its target residue, generally occurs at sites where Cys, Leu, Lys, Arg, Ser and Met are abundant. Furthermore, functional properties of the three types of palmitoylated proteins were compared. We observed similar functional behavior of Cys and Gly palmitoylated proteins but proteins with Ser palmitoylation showed distinctiveness from remaining two. Motif-wise functional conservation was also observed in Cys palmitoylated proteins. We also did functional annotation of predicted human palmitoylome. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.