ENTPRISE: An Algorithm for Predicting Human Disease-Associated Amino Acid Substitutions from Sequence Entropy and Predicted Protein Structures

The advance of next-generation sequencing technologies has made exome sequencing rapid and relatively inexpensive. A major application of exome sequencing is the identification of genetic variations likely to cause Mendelian diseases. This requires processing large amounts of sequence information and therefore computational approaches that can accurately and efficiently identify the subset of disease-associated variations are needed. The accuracy and high false positive rates of existing computational tools leave much room for improvement. Here, we develop a boosted tree regression machine-learning approach to predict human disease-associated amino acid variations by utilizing a comprehensive combination of protein sequence and structure features. On comparing our method, ENTPRISE, to the state-of-the-art methods SIFT, PolyPhen-2, MUTATIONASSESSOR, MUTATIONTASTER, FATHMM, ENTPRISE exhibits significant improvement. In particular, on a testing dataset consisting of only proteins with balanced disease-associated and neutral variations defined as having the ratio of neutral/disease-associated variations between 0.3 and 3, the Mathews Correlation Coefficient by ENTPRISE is 0.493 as compared to 0.432 by PPH2-HumVar, 0.406 by SIFT, 0.403 by MUTATIONASSESSOR, 0.402 by PPH2-HumDiv, 0.305 by MUTATIONTASTER, and 0.181 by FATHMM. ENTPRISE is then applied to nucleic acid binding proteins in the human proteome. Disease-associated predictions are shown to be highly correlated with the number of protein-protein interactions. Both these predictions and the ENTPRISE server are freely available for academic users as a web service at http://cssb.biology.gatech.edu/entprise/.