Predicting Crystallization Propensity of Proteins from Arabidopsis Thaliana

BACKGROUND: Many studies have correlated characteristics of amino acids with crystallization propensity, as part of the effort to determine the factors that affect the propensity of protein crystallization. However, these characteristics are constant; that is, the encoded amino acid sequences have the same value for each type of amino acid. To overcome this inflexibility, three dynamic characteristics of amino acids and protein were introduced to analyze the crystallization propensity of proteins. Both logistic regression and neural network models were used to correlate each of two dynamic characteristics with the crystallization propensity of 301 proteins from Arabidopsis thaliana, and their results were compared with those obtained from each of 531 constant amino acid characteristics, which served as the benchmark. RESULTS: The neural network model was more powerful for predicting the crystallization propensity of proteins than the logistic regression model. Compared with the benchmark, the dynamic characteristics of amino acids provided good prediction results for the crystallization propensity, and the distribution probability gave the highest sensitivity. Using 90 % accuracy as a cutoff point, the predictable portion of A. thaliana portions was ranked, and the statistical analysis showed that the larger the predictable portion, the better the prediction. CONCLUSIONS: These results demonstrate that dynamic characteristics have a certain relationship with the crystallization propensity, and they could be helpful for the prediction of protein crystallization, which may provide a theoretical concept for certain proteins before conducting experimental crystallization. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12575-015-0029-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.