Cited by 98Protein Structure and DynamicsMachine Learning in BioinformaticsFractal and DNA sequence analysis

Amino acid encoding methods for protein sequences: a comprehensive review and assessment

Jing, Xiaoyang, Dong, Qiwen, Hong, Daocheng, Lu, Ruqian·2020·IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

Abstract

As the first step of machine-learning based protein structure and function prediction, the amino acid encoding play a fundamental role in the final success of those methods. Different from the protein sequence encoding, the amino acid encoding can be used in both residue-level and sequence-level prediction of protein properties by combining them with different algorithms. However, it has not attracted enough attention in the past decades, and there are no comprehensive reviews and assessments about encoding methods so far. In this article, we make a systematic classification and propose a comprehensive review and assessment for various amino acid encoding methods. Those methods are grouped into five categories according to their information sources and information extraction methodologies, including binary encoding, physicochemical properties encoding, evolution-based encoding, structure-based encoding, and machine-learning encoding. Then, 16 representative methods from five categories are selected and compared on protein secondary structure prediction and protein fold recognition tasks by using large-scale benchmark datasets. The results show that the evolution-based position-dependent encoding method PSSM achieved the best performance, and the structure-based and machine-learning encoding methods also show some potential for further application, the neural network based distributed representation of amino acids in particular may bring new light to this area. We hope that the review and assessment are useful for future studies in amino acid encoding.

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Crossref · 10.1109/tcbb.2019.2911677

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  • Methods like k-mer splitting have been developed to better interpret the biological grammar and semantics inherent in molecular data.

    “Methods like k-mer splitting [39], among others [40], have been developed to better interpret the biological grammar and semantics inherent in molecular data.”

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Authors
Jing, X., Dong, Q., Hong, D., & Lu, R.
Affiliations
  • Fudan University (CN)
  • East China Normal University (CN)
Venue
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Published
2020-11-01
Volume
17
Issue
6
Pages
1918-1931
ISSN
  • 1545-5963 (ISSN-L)
  • 1557-9964
  • 2374-0043
OpenAlex
W2940438782
Cited by
97
References
70
Citations by year
2026: 14 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 13 · 2023: 16 · 2022: 23 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 7
FWCI
0.88
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
  • IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Funders
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (61672234, U1401256, U1711262, 61402177)
  • National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFB1000905)
Topics
  • 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
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Fractal and DNA sequence analysis
Keywords
amino acid encoding, protein sequence representation, secondary structure prediction, protein fold recognition, position weight matrices, physicochemical properties
MeSH terms
Algorithms, Amino Acid Sequence, Amino Acids, Proteins, Protein Structure, Secondary, Protein Folding, Computational Biology, Sequence Analysis, Protein

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