Impact of structural prior knowledge in SNV prediction: Towards causal variant finding in rare disease

Can structural information of proteins generate essential features for predicting the deleterious effect of a single nucleotide variant (SNV) independent of the known existence of the SNV in diseases? In this work, we answer the question by examining the performance of features generated from prior knowledge with the goal towards determining the pathogenic effect of rare variants in rare disease. We take the approach of prioritizing SNV loci focusing on protein structure-based features. The proposed structure-based features are generated from geometric, physical, chemical, and functional properties of the variant loci and structural neighbors of the loci utilizing multiple homologous structures. The performance of the structure-based features alone, trained on 80% of HumVar-HumDiv combination (HumVD-train) and tested on 20% of HumVar-HumDiv (HumVD-test), ClinVar and ClinVar rare variant rare disease (ClinVarRVRD) datasets, showed high levels of discernibility in determining the SNV’s pathogenic or benign effects on patients. Combined structure- and sequence-based features generated from prior knowledge on a random forest model further improved the F scores to 0.84 (HumVD-test), 0.75 (ClinVar), and 0.75 (ClinVarRVRD). Including features based on the difference between wild-type in addition to the features based on loci information increased the F score slightly more to 0.90 (HumVD-test), 0.78 (ClinVar), and 0.76 (ClinVarRVRD). The empirical examination and high F scores of the results based on loci information alone suggest that location of SNV plays a primary role in determining functional impact of mutation and that structure-based features can help enhance the prediction performance.