MF-EFP: Predicting Multi-Functional Enzymes Function Using Improved Hybrid Multi-Label Classifier

Predicting enzymes function is an important and difficult problem, particularly when enzymes may have the multiplex character, i.e., some enzymes simultaneously have two or three function classes. Most of the existing enzyme function predictor can only be used to deal with the mono-functional enzymes. Actually, multi-functional enzymes should not be ignored because they usually possess diverse biological functions worthy of our special notice. By introducing the “improved Hybrid Multi-label Classifier” and “neighbor score”, a new predictor, called MF-EFP, has been developed that can be used to deal with the systems containing both mono-functional and multi-functional enzymes. As demonstration, the jackknife cross-validation was performed with MF-EFP on a benchmark dataset of enzymes classified into the following 7 functional classes: (1) EC 1 Oxidoreductase, (2) EC 2 Transferase, (3) EC 3 Hydrolase, (4) EC 4 Lyase, (5) EC 5 Isomerase, (6) EC 6 Ligase, (7) EC7 Translocases, where none of enzymes included has ≥90% pairwise sequence identity to any other in a same subset. The subset accuracy and average precision thus obtained by MF-EFP was 85.62% and 94.16% respectively. Extensive experiments also show that MF-EFP can outperform the existing predictors that also have the capacity to deal with such a complicated and stringent system. As a user-friendly web-server, MF-EFP is freely accessible to the public at the web-site http://www.jci-bioinfo.cn/MF-EFP.