LMDIPred: A web-server for prediction of linear peptide sequences binding to SH3, WW and PDZ domains

Protein-peptide interactions form an important subset of the total protein interaction network in the cell and play key roles in signaling and regulatory networks, and in major biological processes like cellular localization, protein degradation, and immune response. In this work, we have described the LMDIPred web server, an online resource for generalized prediction of linear peptide sequences that may bind to three most prevalent and well-studied peptide recognition modules (PRMs)—SH3, WW and PDZ. We have developed support vector machine (SVM)-based prediction models that achieved maximum Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.85 with an accuracy of 94.55% for SH3, MCC of 0.90 with an accuracy of 95.82% for WW, and MCC of 0.83 with an accuracy of 92.29% for PDZ binding peptides. LMDIPred output combines predictions from these SVM models with predictions using Position-Specific Scoring Matrices (PSSMs) and string-matching methods using known domain-binding motif instances and regular expressions. All of these methods were evaluated using a five-fold cross-validation technique on both balanced and unbalanced datasets, and also validated on independent datasets. LMDIPred aims to provide a preliminary bioinformatics platform for sequence-based prediction of probable binding sites for SH3, WW or PDZ domains.