Accurate prediction of protein torsion angles using evolutionary signatures and recurrent neural network.

The amino acid sequence of a protein contains all the necessary information to specify its shape, which dictates its biological activities. However, it is challenging and expensive to experimentally determine the three-dimensional structure of proteins. The backbone torsion angles play a critical role in protein structure prediction, and accurately predicting the angles can considerably advance the tertiary structure prediction by accelerating efficient sampling of the large conformational space for low energy structures. Here we first time propose evolutionary signatures computed from protein sequence profiles, and a novel recurrent architecture, termed ESIDEN, that adopts a straightforward architecture of recurrent neural networks with a small number of learnable parameters. The ESIDEN can capture efficient information from both the classic and new features benefiting from different recurrent architectures in processing information. On the other hand, compared to widely used classic features, the new features, especially the Ramachandran basin potential, provide statistical and evolutionary information to improve prediction accuracy. On four widely used benchmark datasets, the ESIDEN significantly improves the accuracy in predicting the torsion angles by comparison to the best-so-far methods. As demonstrated in the present study, the predicted angles can be used as structural constraints to accurately infer protein tertiary structures. Moreover, the proposed features would pave the way to improve machine learning-based methods in protein folding and structure prediction, as well as function prediction. The source code and data are available at the website https://kornmann.bioch.ox.ac.uk/leri/resources/download.html .

A Nonhomogeneous Cuckoo Search Algorithm Based on Quantum Mechanism for Real Parameter Optimization.

Cuckoo search (CS) algorithm is a nature-inspired search algorithm, in which all the individuals have identical search behaviors. However, this simple homogeneous search behavior is not always optimal to find the potential solution to a special problem, and it may trap the individuals into local regions leading to premature convergence. To overcome the drawback, this paper presents a new variant of CS algorithm with nonhomogeneous search strategies based on quantum mechanism to enhance search ability of the classical CS algorithm. Featured contributions in this paper include: 1) quantum-based strategy is developed for nonhomogeneous update laws and 2) we, for the first time, present a set of theoretical analyses on CS algorithm as well as the proposed algorithm, respectively, and conclude a set of parameter boundaries guaranteeing the convergence of the CS algorithm and the proposed algorithm. On 24 benchmark functions, we compare our method with five existing CS-based methods and other ten state-of-the-art algorithms. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is significantly better than the original CS algorithm and the rest of compared methods according to two nonparametric tests.

Protein folds recognized by an intelligent predictor based-on evolutionary and structural information.

Protein fold recognition is an important and essential step in determining tertiary structure of a protein in biological science. In this study, a model termed NiRecor is developed for recognizing protein folds based on artificial neural networks incorporated in an adaptive heterogeneous particle swarm optimizer. The main contribution of NiRecor is that it is a data-driven and highly-performing predictor without manually tuning control parameters for different data sets. In biological science, since evolutionary- and structure-based information of amino acid sequences is greatly important in determination of tertiary structure of a protein, accordingly, in NiRecor we employ two different feature sets, which involve position specific scoring matrix and secondary structure prediction matrix, to predict the structural classes of protein folds. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed method is powerful in predicting protein folds with higher precisions by improvements of 1.1 ∼7.8 percentages on three benchmark datasets by comparing with several existing predictors.

Adaptive firefly algorithm: parameter analysis and its application.

As a nature-inspired search algorithm, firefly algorithm (FA) has several control parameters, which may have great effects on its performance. In this study, we investigate the parameter selection and adaptation strategies in a modified firefly algorithm - adaptive firefly algorithm (AdaFa). There are three strategies in AdaFa including (1) a distance-based light absorption coefficient; (2) a gray coefficient enhancing fireflies to share difference information from attractive ones efficiently; and (3) five different dynamic strategies for the randomization parameter. Promising selections of parameters in the strategies are analyzed to guarantee the efficient performance of AdaFa. AdaFa is validated over widely used benchmark functions, and the numerical experiments and statistical tests yield useful conclusions on the strategies and the parameter selections affecting the performance of AdaFa. When applied to the real-world problem - protein tertiary structure prediction, the results demonstrated improved variants can rebuild the tertiary structure with the average root mean square deviation less than 0.4Å and 1.5Å from the native constrains with noise free and 10% Gaussian white noise.