State of the art prediction of HIV-1 protease cleavage sites.

Motivation: Understanding the substrate specificity of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-1 protease is important when designing effective HIV-1 protease inhibitors. Furthermore, characterizing and predicting the cleavage profile of HIV-1 protease is essential to generate and test hypotheses of how HIV-1 affects proteins of the human host. Currently available tools for predicting cleavage by HIV-1 protease can be improved.

Results: The linear support vector machine with orthogonal encoding is shown to be the best predictor for HIV-1 protease cleavage. It is considerably better than current publicly available predictor services. It is also found that schemes using physicochemical properties do not improve over the standard orthogonal encoding scheme. Some issues with the currently available data are discussed.

Availability And Implementation: The datasets used, which are the most important part, are available at the UCI Machine Learning Repository. The tools used are all standard and easily available.

Contact: thorsteinn.rognvaldsson@hh.se.