An effective feature extraction with deep neural network architecture for protein-secondary-structure prediction

Abstract

With the increased importance of proteins in day-to-day life, it is imperative to know the protein functions. Deciphering protein structure elucidates protein functions. Experimental approaches for protein-structure analysis are expensive and time-consuming, and require high dexterity. Thus, finding a viable computational approach is vital. Due to the high complexity of predicting protein structure (tertiary structure) directly, research in this field aims at the protein-secondary-structure prediction which is directly related to its tertiary structure. This research aims at exploring a plethora of features, namely position-specific scoring matrices, hidden Markov model alignment matrices, and physicochemical properties, that carry rich information required to predict the secondary structure. Furthermore, it aims at exploring a suitable combination of the features which could capture diverse information about the protein secondary structure. Finally, a cascaded convolutional neural network and bidirectional long short-term memory architecture is fit on the models, and two evaluation metrics, namely, Q8 score and segment overlap score, are benchmarked on various datasets. Our proposed model trained on data of CB6133 dataset and tested on CB513 dataset beats the benchmark models by a minimum of 2.9%. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature.