Mal-Lys: prediction of lysine malonylation sites in proteins integrated sequence-based features with mRMR feature selection

Lysine malonylation is an important post-translational modification (PTM) in proteins, and has been characterized to be associated with diseases. However, identifying malonyllysine sites still remains to be a great challenge due to the labor-intensive and time-consuming experiments. In view of this situation, the establishment of a useful computational method and the development of an efficient predictor are highly desired. In this study, a predictor Mal-Lys which incorporated residue sequence order information, position-specific amino acid propensity and physicochemical properties was proposed. A feature selection method of minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance (mRMR) was used to select optimal ones from the whole features. With the leave-one-out validation, the value of the area under the curve (AUC) was calculated as 0.8143, whereas 6-, 8- and 10-fold cross-validations had similar AUC values which showed the robustness of the predictor Mal-Lys. The predictor also showed satisfying performance in the experimental data from the UniProt database. Meanwhile, a user-friendly web-server for Mal-Lys is accessible at http://app.aporc.org/Mal-Lys/.