Computational Prediction and Analysis for Tyrosine Post-Translational Modifications via Elastic Net

The tyrosine residue has been identified as suffering three major post-translational modifications (PTMs) including nitration, sulfation, and phosphorylation, which could be involved in different physiological and pathological processes. Multiple tyrosine residues of the whole protein may be modified concurrently, where PTM of a single tyrosine may affect modification of other neighboring tyrosine residues. Hence, it is significant and beneficial to predict nitration, sulfation, and phosphorylation of tyrosine residues in the whole protein sequence. Here, we introduce elastic net to perform feature selection and develop a predictor named TyrPred for predicting nitrotyrosine, sulfotyrosine, and kinase-specific tyrosine phosphorylation sites on the basis of support vector machine. We critically evaluate the performance of TyrPred and compare it with other existing tools. The satisfying results show that using elastic net to mine important features for training can considerably improve the prediction performance. Feature optimization indicates that evolutionary information is significant and contributes to the prediction model. The online tool is established at http://computbiol.ncu.edu.cn/TyrPred. We anticipate that TyrPred can provide useful complements to the existing approaches in this field.