iProtease-PseAAC(2L): A two-layer predictor for identifying proteases and their types using Chou's 5-step-rule and general PseAAC.

Proteases are a type of enzymes, which perform the process of proteolysis. Proteolysis normally refers to protein and peptide degradation which is crucial for the survival, growth and wellbeing of a cell. Moreover, proteases have a strong association with therapeutics and drug development. The proteases are classified into five different types according to their nature and physiochemical characteristics. Mostly the methods used to differentiate protease from other proteins and identify their class requires a clinical test which is usually time-consuming and operator dependent. Herein, we report a classifier named iProtease-PseAAC (2L) for identifying proteases and their classes. The predictor is developed employing the flow of 5-step rule, initiating from the collection of benchmark dataset and terminating at the development of predictor. Rigorous verification and validation tests are performed and metrics are collected to calculate the authenticity of the trained model. The self-consistency validation gives the 98.32% accuracy, for cross-validation the accuracy is 90.71% and jackknife gives 96.07% accuracy. The average accuracy for level-2 i.e. protease classification is 95.77%. Based on the above-mentioned results, it is concluded that iProtease-PseAAC (2L) has the great ability to identify the proteases and their classes using a given protein sequence.