A word of caution about biological inference - Revisiting cysteine covalent state predictions

Éva Tüdos, Bálint Mészáros, András Fiser, István Simon

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

The success of methods for predicting the redox state of cysteine residues from the sequence environment seemed to validate the basic assumption that this state is mainly determined locally. However, the accuracy of predictions on randomized sequences or of non-cysteine residues remained high, suggesting that these predictions rather capture global features of proteins such as subcellular localization, which depends on composition. This illustrates that even high prediction accuracy is insufficient to validate implicit assumptions about a biological phenomenon. Correctly identifying the relevant underlying biochemical reasons for the success of a method is essential to gain proper biological insights and develop more accurate and novel bioinformatics tools.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)310-314
Number of pages5
JournalFEBS Open Bio
Volume4
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014

Keywords

  • Biological inference
  • Cysteine redox state
  • Prediction accuracies
  • Protein prediction
  • Protein structure

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology

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