A consensus subunit-specific model for annotation of substrate specificity for ABC transporters†
* Corresponding authors
a College of Chemistry, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610064, People's Republic of China
E-mail:yzguo@scu.edu.cn,xmpuscu@scu.edu.cn
Fax: +86-028-85412290
Tel: +86-028-85412290
Abstract
Members of the ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporter family are present in three kingdoms of life and play a vital role in most cellular functions. ABC transporters function as either importers that bring nutrients and other molecules into cells, or as exporters that pump toxins, drugs and lipids across membranes. Currently, the limitation of 3D structures highlights the importance of the functional annotation for transporters using bioinformatics-based methods. In this work, we focused on annotation of substrate specificity for ABC transporters. Three types of the subunit proteins of ABC transporters, namely permease protein, ATP-binding protein and substrate binding protein all contribute much to the transport process, but have unique structures and properties. However previous computational methods have only considered the three subunit proteins in the same way and cannot individually characterize each type of subunit protein. Here, through individual feature evaluation and selection, specific representation for each type of subunit protein was implemented. Then three subunit-specific models were built to consistently analyse four major classes of ABC transporters with different transport targets. Our method achieved a 5-fold cross validation accuracy of 93.35%, 84.34%, 87.24% and 81.96% for sugar transporter, ion transporter, amino acid/protein transporter and others, respectively. Our method also showed an overall prediction accuracy of 88.02% with a Mathew's correlation coefficient of 0.6736 on an independent dataset. The results suggest that considering three subunit proteins separately and developing individual models for three substrate protein groups are recommendable. This method would be an effective tool for computational annotation of substrate specificity for ABC transporters.

Supplementary files
Article information
- Article type
- Paper
- Submitted
- 25 Mar 2015
- Accepted
- 05 May 2015
- First published
- 05 May 2015
Author version available
Permissions

A consensus subunit-specific model for annotation of substrate specificity for ABC transporters
Y. Hu, Y. Guo, Y. Shi, M. Li and X. Pu,RSC Adv., 2015, 5, 42009DOI: 10.1039/C5RA05304H
To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to theCopyright Clearance Center request page.
If you arean author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.
If you arethe author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to theCopyright Clearance Center request page.
Read more abouthow to correctly acknowledge RSC content.
