Source
Laboratori de Bioinformàtica Estructural (GRIB), Departament de Ciències Experimentals i de la Salut, Universitat Pompeu Fabra-IMIM, 08003-Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. wisl@bioinf.uab.es
Abstract
BACKGROUND:
A number of studies have used protein interaction data alone for protein function prediction. Here, we introduce a computational approach for annotation of enzymes, based on the observation that similar protein sequences are more likely to perform the same function if they share similar interacting partners.
RESULTS:
The method has been tested against the PSI-BLAST program using a set of 3,890 protein sequences from which interaction data was available. For protein sequences that align with at least 40% sequence identity to a known enzyme, the specificity of our method in predicting the first three EC digits increased from 80% to 90% at 80% coverage when compared to PSI-BLAST.
CONCLUSION:
Our method can also be used in proteins for which homologous sequences with known interacting partners can be detected. Thus, our method could increase 10% the specificity of genome-wide enzyme predictions based on sequence matching by PSI-BLAST alone.