Prediction of protein subcellular location using hydrophobic patterns of amino acid sequence

The function of eukaryotic protein is closely correlated with its subcellular location. The number of newly found protein sequences entering into data banks is rapidly increasing with the success of human genome project. It is highly desirable to predict a protein subcellular automatically from its amino acid sequence. In this paper, amino acid hydrophobic patterns and average power-spectral density (APSD) are introduced to define pseudo amino acid composition. The covariant-discriminant predictor is used to predict subcellular location. Immune-genetic algorithm (IGA) is used to find the fittest weight factors which are very important in this method. As such, high success rates are obtained by both self-consistency test (86%) and jackknife test (73%). More than 80% predictive accuracy is achieved in independent dataset test. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is practical. And, the method illuminates that the protein subcellular location can be predicted from its surface physio-chemical characteristic of protein folding.