SAMbinder: A web server for predicting SAM binding residues of a protein from its amino acid sequence

MotivationS-adenosyl-L-methionine (SAM) is one of the important cofactor present in the biological system and play a key role in many diseases. There is a need to develop a method for predicting SAM binding sites in a protein for designing drugs against SAM associated disease. Best of our knowledge, there is no method that can predict the binding site of SAM in a given protein sequence.\n\nResultThis manuscript describes a method SAMbinder, developed for predicting SAM binding sites in a protein from its primary sequence. All models were trained, tested and evaluated on 145 SAM binding protein chains where no two chains have more than 40% sequence similarity. Firstly, models were developed using different machine learning techniques on a balanced dataset contain 2188 SAM interacting and an equal number of non-interacting residues. Our Random Forest based model developed using binary profile feature got maximum MCC 0.42 with AUROC 0.79 on the validation dataset. The performance of our models improved significantly from MCC 0.42 to 0.61, when evolutionary information in the form of PSSM profile is used as a feature. We also developed models on realistic dataset contains 2188 SAM interacting and 40029 non-interacting residues and got maximum MCC 0.61 with AUROC of 0.89. In order to evaluate the performance of our models, we used internal as well as external cross-validation technique.\n\nAvailability and implementationhttps://webs.iiitd.edu.in/raghava/sambinder/.