Hierarchical deep learning for predicting GO annotations by integrating protein knowledge

Motivation: Experimental testing and manual curation are the most precise ways for assigning Gene Ontology (GO) terms describing protein functions. However, they are expensive, time-consuming and cannot cope with the exponential growth of data generated by high-throughput sequencing methods. Hence,...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Merino, Gabriela Alejandra, Saidi, Rabie, Milone, Diego Humberto, Stegmayer, Georgina, Martin, Maria J.
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2022
Country:Argentina
Institution:Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
Repository:CONICET Digital (CONICET)
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:ri.conicet.gov.ar:11336/210988
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/11336/210988
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:AUTOMATIC FUNCTION PREDICTION
PROTEIN ANNOTATION
DEEP LEARNING
KNOWLEDGE INTEGRATION
GO TERMS PREDICTION
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/1.2
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/1
Description
Summary:Motivation: Experimental testing and manual curation are the most precise ways for assigning Gene Ontology (GO) terms describing protein functions. However, they are expensive, time-consuming and cannot cope with the exponential growth of data generated by high-throughput sequencing methods. Hence, researchers need reliable computational systems to help fill the gap with automatic function prediction. The results of the last Critical Assessment of Function Annotation challenge revealed that GO-terms prediction remains a very challenging task. Recent developments on deep learning are significantly breaking out the frontiers leading to new knowledge in protein research thanks to the integration of data from multiple sources. However, deep models hitherto developed for functional prediction are mainly focused on sequence data and have not achieved breakthrough performances yet. Results: We propose DeeProtGO, a novel deep-learning model for predicting GO annotations by integrating protein knowledge. DeeProtGO was trained for solving 18 different prediction problems, defined by the three GO sub-ontologies, the type of proteins, and the taxonomic kingdom. Our experiments reported higher prediction quality when more protein knowledge is integrated. We also benchmarked DeeProtGO against state-of-the-art methods on public datasets, and showed it can effectively improve the prediction of GO annotations.