METSP: A Maximum-Entropy Classifier Based Text Mining Tool for Transporter-Substrate Identification with Semistructured Text

The substrates of a transporter are not only useful for inferring function of the transporter, but also important to discover compound-compound interaction and to reconstruct metabolic pathway. Though plenty of data has been accumulated with the developing of new technologies such as in vitro transporter assays, the search for substrates of transporters is far from complete. In this article, we introduce METSP, a maximum-entropy classifier devoted to retrieve transporter-substrate pairs (TSPs) from semistructured text. Based on the high quality annotation from UniProt, METSP achieves high precision and recall in cross-validation experiments. When METSP is applied to 182,829 human transporter annotation sentences in UniProt, it identifies 3942 sentences with transporter and compound information. Finally, 1547 confidential human TSPs are identified for further manual curation, among which 58.37% pairs with novel substrates not annotated in public transporter databases. METSP is the first efficient tool to extract TSPs from semistructured annotation text in UniProt. This tool can help to determine the precise substrates and drugs of transporters, thus facilitating drug-target prediction, metabolic network reconstruction, and literature classification.