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Cited by 1Genomics and Rare DiseasesProtein Structure and DynamicsMachine Learning in Bioinformatics

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ASCARIS: Positional feature annotation and protein structure-based representation of single amino acid variations

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Cankara, Fatma, Doğan, Tunca·2023·Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal
DOI 10.1016/j.csbj.2023.09.017PMC PMC10562615

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Abstract

Background: Genomic variations may cause deleterious effects on protein functionality and perturb biological processes. Elucidating the effects of variations is critical for developing novel treatment strategies for diseases of genetic origin. Computational approaches have been aiding the work in this field by modeling and analyzing the mutational landscape. However, new approaches are required, especially for accurate representation and data-centric analysis of sequence variations. Method: In this study, we propose ASCARIS (Annotation and StruCture-bAsed RepresentatIon of Single amino acid variations), a method for the featurization (i.e., quantitative representation) of single amino acid variations (SAVs), which could be used for a variety of purposes, such as predicting their functional effects or building multi-omics-based integrative models. ASCARIS utilizes the direct and spatial correspondence between the location of the SAV on the sequence/structure and 30 different types of positional feature annotations (e.g., active/lipidation/glycosylation sites; calcium/metal/DNA binding, inter/transmembrane regions, etc.), along with structural features and physicochemical properties. The main novelty of this method lies in constructing reusable numerical representations of SAVs via functional annotations. Results: We statistically analyzed the relationship between these features and the consequences of variations and found that each carries information in this regard. To investigate potential applications of ASCARIS, we trained variant effect prediction models that utilize our SAV representations as input. We carried out an ablation study and a comparison against the state-of-the-art methods and observed that ASCARIS has a competing and complementary performance against widely-used predictors. ASCARIS can be used alone or in combination with other approaches to represent SAVs from a functional perspective. ASCARIS is available as a programmatic tool at https://github.com/HUBioDataLab/ASCARIS and as a web-service at https://huggingface.co/spaces/HUBioDataLab/ASCARIS.

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Graphical abstract CC BY-NC-ND · PubMed Central
Fig. 1 The overall workflow of the proposed variant featurization/representation method, ASCARIS, together with its application to the problem of variant effect prediction.
Fig. 1 The overall workflow of the proposed variant featurization/representation method, ASCARIS, together with its application to the problem of variant effect prediction.CC BY-NC-ND · PubMed Central
Fig. 2 Dataset construction and featurization steps: (a) the sources of structural information and statistics about the data from each source, (b) the representation of different types of features on SAV representations, (c) mapping of positional sequence annotations and the SAV onto the 3-D protein structure, and part of the SAV feature vector that corresponds to these annotations.
Fig. 2 Dataset construction and featurization steps: (a) the sources of structural information and statistics about the data from each source, (b) the representation of different types of features on SAV representations, (c) mapping of positional sequence annotations and the SAV onto the 3-D protein structure, and part of the SAV feature vector that corresponds to these annotations.CC BY-NC-ND · PubMed Central
Fig. 3 . (a) Distribution of neutral and deleterious SAV data points according to their domain region correspondence. Mutations found within the domains tend to be more deleterious (61.3%) compared to the ones outside (30.6%), (b) distribution of neutral and deleterious SAV data points according to their location on the structure of the protein. Mutations found within the core and interface regions tend to be more deleterious (71.7% and 69.4%, respectively) compared to the ones on the surface (48.6%).
Fig. 3 . (a) Distribution of neutral and deleterious SAV data points according to their domain region correspondence. Mutations found within the domains tend to be more deleterious (61.3%) compared to the ones outside (30.6%), (b) distribution of neutral and deleterious SAV data points according to their location on the structure of the protein. Mutations found within the core and interface regions tend to be more deleterious (71.7% and 69.4%, respectively) compared to the ones on the surface (48.6%).CC BY-NC-ND · PubMed Central
Fig. 4 . (a) The coverage of each annotation category on the proteins in our SAV dataset (e.g., nearly 23% of proteins in our dataset have at least one active site annotation in UniProtKB), (b) the rates of deleterious vs neutral variations for each annotation category, which are calculated considering the SAV data points in our dataset that coincide with a positional annotation on the same residue, (c) Mean spatial distances between annotated residues and mutated residues in the structure, calculated independently for each annotation category, considering the cases in which the SAV and annotated residue do not coincide on the same residue. In the case of the existence of multiple annotations on a protein, only the annotation that is located spatially closest to the mutation of interest is taken into account. Dashed lines indicate overall averages calculated by taking the mean of all distances. For the calculation of Euclidean distances between residues, the coordinates of C⍺ of the respective amino acids are extracted from PDB models.
Fig. 4 . (a) The coverage of each annotation category on the proteins in our SAV dataset (e.g., nearly 23% of proteins in our dataset have at least one active site annotation in UniProtKB), (b) the rates of deleterious vs neutral variations for each annotation category, which are calculated considering the SAV data points in our dataset that coincide with a positional annotation on the same residue, (c) Mean spatial distances between annotated residues and mutated residues in the structure, calculated independently for each annotation category, considering the cases in which the SAV and annotated residue do not coincide on the same residue. In the case of the existence of multiple annotations on a protein, only the annotation that is located spatially closest to the mutation of interest is taken into account. Dashed lines indicate overall averages calculated by taking the mean of all distances. For the calculation of Euclidean distances between residues, the coordinates of C⍺ of the respective amino acids are extracted from PDB models.CC BY-NC-ND · PubMed Central
Fig. 5 Performance results (AUROC) of ASCARIS and 46 different VEPs from the literature, on the deep mutational scanning data. AUROC scores indicate the success of methods in distinguishing deleterious (pathogenic) SAVs from the neutral (benign) ones on the; (a) BRCA1, (b) CALM1, and (c) P53 genes. The number of test SAVs for each class are shown in plot titles. ASCARIS scores are shown in blue colored bars (DMS: deep mutational scanning, Supervised: machine learning -ML- models that learns from labeled samples, Unsupervised: ML models that learns from evolutionary conservation and multiple sequence alignments, Empirical: different from ML models, these are VEPs that rely on empirical calculations, Metapredictor: mostly supervised ML models that utilize the results of other VEPs as its input).
Fig. 5 Performance results (AUROC) of ASCARIS and 46 different VEPs from the literature, on the deep mutational scanning data. AUROC scores indicate the success of methods in distinguishing deleterious (pathogenic) SAVs from the neutral (benign) ones on the; (a) BRCA1, (b) CALM1, and (c) P53 genes. The number of test SAVs for each class are shown in plot titles. ASCARIS scores are shown in blue colored bars (DMS: deep mutational scanning, Supervised: machine learning -ML- models that learns from labeled samples, Unsupervised: ML models that learns from evolutionary conservation and multiple sequence alignments, Empirical: different from ML models, these are VEPs that rely on empirical calculations, Metapredictor: mostly supervised ML models that utilize the results of other VEPs as its input).CC BY-NC-ND · PubMed Central

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Metadata

Authors
Cankara, F., & Doğan, T.
Affiliations
  • Koç University (TR)
  • Hacettepe University (TR)
Corresponding author
Doğan, Tunca
ORCID
Venue
Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Published
2023-01
Volume
21
Pages
4743-4758
ISSN
2001-0370 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1016/j.csbj.2023.09.017
PMC
PMC10562615
OpenAlex
W4386813159
Cited by
1
References
5
Citations by year
2026: 1
FWCI
0.17
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (acceptedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • Digital Collections portal (Koç University) (submittedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Funders
Koç Üniversitesi
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Genomics and Rare Diseases
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Protein Structure and Dynamics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Machine Learning in Bioinformatics
Keywords
variant effect prediction, protein structure, functional annotation, protein binding sites, physicochemical properties, multi-omics integration, Ascaris

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Cankara, F., & Doğan, T. (2023). ASCARIS: Positional feature annotation and protein structure-based representation of single amino acid variations. Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csbj.2023.09.017