The Prediction of Calpain Cleavage Sites with the mRMR and IFS Approaches

Calpains are an important family of the Ca 2+ -dependent cysteine proteases which catalyze the limited proteolysis of many specific substrates. Calpains play crucial roles in basic physiological and pathological processes, and identification of the calpain cleavage sites may facilitate the understanding of the molecular mechanisms and biological function. But traditional experiment approaches to predict the sites are accurate, and are always labor-intensive and time-consuming. Thus, it is common to see that computational methods receive increasing attention due to their convenience and fast speed in recent years. In this study, we develop a new predictor based on the support vector machine (SVM) with the maximum relevance minimum redundancy (mRMR) method followed by incremental feature selection (IFS). And we concern the feature of physicochemical/biochemical properties, sequence conservation, residual disorder, secondary structure, and solvent accessibility to represent the calpain cleavage sites. Experimental results show that the performance of our predictor is better than several other state-of- the-art predictors, whose average prediction accuracy is 79.49%, sensitivity is 62.31%, and specificity is 88.12%. Since user-friendly and publicly accessible web servers represent the future direction for developing practically more useful predictors, here we have provided a web-server for the method presented in this paper.