
CombFunc: predicting protein function using heterogeneous data sources
Author(s) -
Mark N. Wass,
Geraint Barton,
Michael J.E. Sternberg
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
nucleic acids research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 9.008
H-Index - 537
eISSN - 1362-4954
pISSN - 0305-1048
DOI - 10.1093/nar/gks489
Subject(s) - biology , protein function prediction , computational biology , gene ontology , function (biology) , gene , benchmarking , set (abstract data type) , data set , protein methods , protein function , sequence (biology) , bioinformatics , data mining , genetics , gene expression , sequence analysis , computer science , artificial intelligence , marketing , business , programming language
Only a small fraction of known proteins have been functionally characterized, making protein function prediction essential to propose annotations for uncharacterized proteins. In recent years many function prediction methods have been developed using various sources of biological data from protein sequence and structure to gene expression data. Here we present the CombFunc web server, which makes Gene Ontology (GO)-based protein function predictions. CombFunc incorporates ConFunc, our existing function prediction method, with other approaches for function prediction that use protein sequence, gene expression and protein-protein interaction data. In benchmarking on a set of 1686 proteins CombFunc obtains precision and recall of 0.71 and 0.64 respectively for gene ontology molecular function terms. For biological process GO terms precision of 0.74 and recall of 0.41 is obtained. CombFunc is available at http://www.sbg.bio.ic.ac.uk/combfunc.