Protein subcellular localization prediction based on profile alignment and Gene Ontology

The functions of proteins are closely related to their subcellular locations. Computational methods are required to replace the laborious and time-consuming experimental processes for proteomics research. This paper proposes combining homology-based profile alignment methods and functional-domain based Gene Ontology (GO) methods to predict the subcellular locations of proteins. The feature vectors constructed by these two methods are recognized by support vector machine (SVM) classifiers, and their scores are fused to enhance classification performance. The paper also investigates different approaches to constructing the GO vectors based on the GO terms returned from InterProScan. The results demonstrate that the GO methods are comparable to profile-alignment methods and overshadow those based on amino-acid compositions. Also, the fusion of these two methods can outperform the individual methods.