Predicting multisite protein subcellular locations: progress and challenges

Abstract

In the last two decades, predicting protein subcellular locations has become a hot topic in bioinformatics. A number of algorithms and online services have been developed to computationally assign a subcellular location to a given protein sequence. With the progress of many proteome projects, more and more proteins are annotated with more than one subcellular location. However, multisite prediction has only been considered in a handful of recent studies, in which there are several common challenges. In this special report, the authors discuss what these challenges are, why these challenges are important and how the existing studies gave their solutions. Finally, a vision of the future of predicting multisite protein subcellular locations is given.

Keywords::

• informative features
• multisites
• single site
• subcellular locations

Financial & competing interests disclosure

The authors were supported by National Science Foundation of China (NSFC 61005041), the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education (No. 20100032120039), Tianjin Natural Science Foundation (No. 12JCQNJC02300), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2012T50240 and 2013M530114) and the Seed Foundation of Tianjin University (No. 60302006 and 60302024). The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.