Re-annotation of protein-coding genes in the genome of saccharomyces cerevisiae based on support vector machines

PLoS One. 2013 Jul 10;8(7):e64477. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0064477. Print 2013.

Abstract

The annotation of the well-studied organism, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, has been improving over the past decade while there are unresolved debates over the amount of biologically significant open reading frames (ORFs) in yeast genome. We revisited the total count of protein-coding genes in S. cerevisiae S288c genome using a theoretical approach by combining the Support Vector Machine (SVM) method with six widely used measurements of sequence statistical features. The accuracy of our method is over 99.5% in 10-fold cross-validation. Based on the annotation data in Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD), we studied the coding capacity of all 1744 ORFs which lack experimental results and suggested that the overall number of chromosomal ORFs encoding proteins in yeast should be 6091 by removing 488 spurious ORFs. The importance of the present work lies in at least two aspects. First, cross-validation and retrospective examination showed the fidelity of our method in recognizing ORFs that likely encode proteins. Second, we have provided a web service that can be accessed at http://cobi.uestc.edu.cn/services/yeast/, which enables the prediction of protein-coding ORFs of the genus Saccharomyces with a high accuracy.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Calibration
  • Computational Biology / methods
  • Computational Biology / standards
  • Genes, Fungal
  • Genome, Fungal / genetics*
  • Molecular Sequence Annotation / methods*
  • Molecular Sequence Annotation / standards
  • Multivariate Analysis
  • Open Reading Frames / genetics*
  • Saccharomyces cerevisiae / genetics*
  • Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteins / genetics*
  • Support Vector Machine*

Substances

  • Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteins

Grants and funding

This study was supported by the program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-11-0059), National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant 31071109), and the special fund of the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant 201104687). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.