A hybrid approach for predicting transcription factors

Transcription factors (TFs) are essential DNA-binding proteins that regulate the rate of transcription of several genes and controls the expression of genes inside a cell. The prediction of TFs with high precision is important for understanding number of biological processes such as cell-differentiation, intracellular signaling, cell-cycle control. In this study, we developed a hybrid method that combine alignment-based and alignment-free methods for predicting transcription factors with higher accuracy. All models have been trained, tested and evaluated on a large dataset that contain 19406 TFs and 523560 non-TFs protein sequences. In order to avoid biasness in evaluation, dataset is divided in training and validation/independent dataset, where 80% data was used for training and remaining 20% for external validation. In case of alignment-free methods, models are developed based on machine learning techniques using compositional features of a protein. Our best alignment-free model obtained AUC 0.97 on independent dataset. In case of alignment-based method, we used BLAST at different cut-off to predict transcription factors. Though alignment-based method shows excellent performance but unable to cover all transcription factor due to no-hits. In order to combine power of both, we developed a hybrid method that combine alignment-free and alignment-based method; achieved maximum AUC of 0.99 on independent dataset. The method proposed in this study perform better than existing methods. We incorporated the best models in the webserver/standalone package “TransFacPred” ( https://webs.iiitd.edu.in/raghava/transfacpred ). Key Points Transcription factors (TFs) are vital DNA-binding proteins. A hybrid method for the prediction of TFs using sequence information. Computer-aided model were developed using machine-learning algorithm to predict TFs. Alignment-based and alignment-free approaches were used for the prediction. A user-friendly webserver, python- and Perl-based standalone package available.