Artificial neural network model for predicting protein subcellular location.

The function of a protein is closely correlated to its subcellular location. Is it possible to utilize a bioinformatics method to predict the protein subcellular location? To explore this problem, proteins are classified into 12 groups (Protein Eng. 12 (1999) 107-118) according to their subcellular location: (1) chloroplast, (2) cytoplasm, (3) cytoskeleton, (4) endoplasmic reticulum, (5) extracellular, (6) Golgi apparatus, (7) lysosome, (8) mitochondria, (9) nucleus, (10) peroxisome, (11) plasma membrane and (12) vacuole. In this paper, the neural network method was proposed to predict the subcellular location of a protein according to its amino acid composition. Results obtained through self-consistency, cross-validation and independent dataset tests are quite high. Accordingly, the present method can serve as a complement tool for the existing prediction methods in this area.