ProtFeat is protein feature extraction tool that utilizes POSSUM and iFeature.

Description:

ProtFeat is designed to extract the protein features by employing POSSUM and iFeature python-based tools. ProtFeat includes a total of 39 distinct protein feature extraction methods (protein descriptors) using 21 PSSM-based protein descriptors from POSSUM and 18 protein descriptors from iFeature.

POSSUM (Position-Specific Scoring matrix-based feature generator for machine learning), a versatile toolkit with an online web server that can generate 21 types of PSSM-based feature descriptors, thereby addressing a crucial need for bioinformaticians and computational biologists.

iFeature, a versatile Python-based toolkit for generating various numerical feature representation schemes for both protein and peptide sequences. iFeature is capable of calculating and extracting a comprehensive spectrum of 18 major sequence encoding schemes that encompass 53 different types of feature descriptors.

Installation

ProtFeat is a python package for feature extracting from protein sequences written in Python 3.9. ProtFeat was developed and tested in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Please make sure that you have Anaconda installed on your computer and run the below commands to install requirements. Dependencies are available in requirements.txt file.

conda create -n protFeat_env python=3.9
conda activate protFeat_env

How to run ProtFeat to extract the protein features

Run the following commands in the given order:

To use ProtFeat as a python package:

pip install protFeat

Then, you may use protFeat as the following in python:

import protFeat
from protFeat.feature_extracter import extract_protein_feature, usage
usage()
extract_protein_feature(protein_feature, place_protein_id, input_folder, fasta_file_name)

For example,

extract_protein_feature("AAC", 1, "input_folder", "sample")

To use ProtFeat from terminal:

Clone the Git Repository.

git clone https://github.com/gozsari/ProtFeat

In terminal or command line navigate into protFeat folder.

cd ProtFeat

Install the requirements by the running the following command.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Altenatively you may run ProtFeat from the terminal as the following:

cd src
python protFeat_command_line.py --pf protein_feature --ppid place_protein_id --inpf input_folder --fname fasta_file_name

For example,

python protFeat_command_line.py --pf AAC --ppid 1 --inpf input_folder --fname sample

Explanation of Parameters

protein_feature: {string}, (default = 'aac_pssm'): one of the protein descriptors in POSSUM and iFeature.

POSSUM descriptors:

aac_pssm, d_fpssm, smoothed_pssm, ab_pssm, pssm_composition, rpm_pssm,
s_fpssm, dpc_pssm, k_separated_bigrams_pssm, eedp, tpc, edp, rpssm,
pse_pssm, dp_pssm, pssm_ac, pssm_cc, aadp_pssm, aatp, medp , or all_POSSUM

Note: all_POSSUM extracts the features of all (21) POSSUM protein descriptors.

iFeature descriptors:

AAC, PAAC, APAAC, DPC, GAAC, CKSAAP, CKSAAGP, GDPC, Moran, Geary,
NMBroto, CTDC, CTDD, CTDT, CTriad, KSCTriad, SOCNumber, QSOrder, or all_iFeature

Note: all_iFeature extracts the features of all (18) iFeature protein descriptors.

place_protein_id: {int}, (default = 1): It indicates the place of protein id in fasta header. e.g. fasta header: >sp|O27002|....|....|...., seperate the header wrt. '|' then >sp is in the zeroth position, protein id in the first(1) position.

input_folder: {string}, (default = 'input_folder'}: it is the path to the folder that contains the fasta file.

fasta_file_name: {string}, (default ='sample'): it is the name of the fasta file exclude the '.fasta' extension.

Input file

It must be in fasta format.

Output file

The extracted feature files will be located under feature_extraction_output folder with the name: fasta_file_name_protein_feature.txt (e.g. sample_AAC.txt).

The content of the output files:

• The output file is tab-seperated.
• Each row corresponds to the extracted features of the protein sequence.
• The first column of each row is UniProtKB id of the proteins, the rest is extracted features of the protein sequence.

Tables of the available protein descriptors

Table 1: Protein descriptors obtained from the POSSUM tool.

License

MIT License

ProtFeat Copyright (C) 2020 CanSyL

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.