MOTIVATION: With the booming of interactome studies, a lot of interactions can be measured in a high throughput way and large scale datasets are available. It is becoming apparent that many different types of interactions can be potential drug targets. Compared with inhibition of a single protein, inhibition of protein-protein interaction (PPI) is promising to improve the specificity with fewer adverse side-effects. Also it greatly broadens the drug target search space, which makes the drug target discovery difficult. Computational methods are highly desired to efficiently provide candidates for further experiments and hold the promise to greatly accelerate the discovery of novel drug targets. RESULTS: Here, we propose a machine learning method to predict PPI targets in a genomic-wide scale. Specifically, we develop a computational method, named as PrePPItar, to Predict PPIs as drug targets by uncovering the potential associations between drugs and PPIs. First, we survey the databases and manually construct a gold-standard positive dataset for drug and PPI interactions. This effort leads to a dataset with 227 associations among 63 PPIs and 113 FDA-approved drugs and allows us to build models to learn the association rules from the data. Second, we characterize drugs by profiling in chemical structure, drug ATC-code annotation, and side-effect space and represent PPI similarity by a symmetrical S-kernel based on protein amino acid sequence. Then the drugs and PPIs are correlated by Kronecker product kernel. Finally, a support vector machine (SVM), is trained to predict novel associations between drugs and PPIs. We validate our PrePPItar method on the well-established gold-standard dataset by cross-validation. We find that all chemical structure, drug ATC-code, and side-effect information are predictive for PPI target. Moreover, we can increase the PPI target prediction coverage by integrating multiple data sources. Follow-up database search and pathway analysis indicate that our new predictions are worthy of future experimental validation. CONCLUSION: In conclusion, PrePPItar can serve as a useful tool for PPI target discovery and provides a general heterogeneous data integrative framework. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: PrePPItar is available at http://doc.aporc.org/wiki/PrePPItar. CONTACT: [email protected] or [email protected] SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

MOTIVATION: Discovering drug's Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) classification rules at molecular level is of vital importance to understand a vast majority of drugs action. However, few studies attempt to annotate drug's potential ATC-codes by computational approaches. RESULTS: Here, we introduce drug-target network to computationally predict drug's ATC-codes and propose a novel method named NetPredATC. Starting from the assumption that drugs with similar chemical structures or target proteins share common ATC-codes, our method, NetPredATC, aims to assign drug's potential ATC-codes by integrating chemical structures and target proteins. Specifically, we first construct a gold-standard positive dataset from drugs' ATC-code annotation databases. Then we characterize ATC-code and drug by their similarity profiles and define kernel function to correlate them. Finally, we use a kernel method, support vector machine, to automatically predict drug's ATC-codes. Our method was validated on four drug datasets with various target proteins, including enzymes, ion channels, G-protein couple receptors and nuclear receptors. We found that both drug's chemical structure and target protein are predictive, and target protein information has better accuracy. Further integrating these two data sources revealed more experimentally validated ATC-codes for drugs. We extensively compared our NetPredATC with SuperPred, which is a chemical similarity-only based method. Experimental results showed that our NetPredATC outperforms SuperPred not only in predictive coverage but also in accuracy. In addition, database search and functional annotation analysis support that our novel predictions are worthy of future experimental validation. CONCLUSION: In conclusion, our new method, NetPredATC, can predict drug's ATC-codes more accurately by incorporating drug-target network and integrating data, which will promote drug mechanism understanding and drug repositioning and discovery. AVAILABILITY: NetPredATC is available at http://doc.aporc.org/wiki/NetPredATC. CONTACT: [email protected] or [email protected] SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

BACKGROUND: With the development of genome-sequencing technologies, protein sequences are readily obtained by translating the measured mRNAs. Therefore predicting protein-protein interactions from the sequences is of great demand. The reason lies in the fact that identifying protein-protein interactions is becoming a bottleneck for eventually understanding the functions of proteins, especially for those organisms barely characterized. Although a few methods have been proposed, the converse problem, if the features used extract sufficient and unbiased information from protein sequences, is almost untouched. RESULTS: In this study, we interrogate this problem theoretically by an optimization scheme. Motivated by the theoretical investigation, we find novel encoding methods for both protein sequences and protein pairs. Our new methods exploit sufficiently the information of protein sequences and reduce artificial bias and computational cost. Thus, it significantly outperforms the available methods regarding sensitivity, specificity, precision, and recall with cross-validation evaluation and reaches ~80% and ~90% accuracy in Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae respectively. Our findings here hold important implication for other sequence-based prediction tasks because representation of biological sequence is always the first step in computational biology. CONCLUSIONS: By considering the converse problem, we propose new representation methods for both protein sequences and protein pairs. The results show that our method significantly improves the accuracy of protein-protein interaction predictions.