Prediction of HIV drug resistance from genotype with encoded three-dimensional protein structure

BACKGROUND: Drug resistance has become a severe challenge for treatment of HIV infections. Mutations accumulate in the HIV genome and make certain drugs ineffective. Prediction of resistance from genotype data is a valuable guide in choice of drugs for effective therapy. RESULTS: In order to improve the computational prediction of resistance from genotype data we have developed a unified encoding of the protein sequence and three-dimensional protein structure of the drug target for classification and regression analysis. The method was tested on genotype-resistance data for mutants of HIV protease and reverse transcriptase. Our graph based sequence-structure approach gives high accuracy with a new sparse dictionary classification method, as well as support vector machine and artificial neural networks classifiers. Cross-validated regression analysis with the sparse dictionary gave excellent correlation between predicted and observed resistance. CONCLUSION: The approach of encoding the protein structure and sequence as a 210-dimensional vector, based on Delaunay triangulation, has promise as an accurate method for predicting resistance from sequence for drugs inhibiting HIV protease and reverse transcriptase.