Quokka: A comprehensive tool for rapid and accurate prediction of kinase family-specific phosphorylation sites in the human proteome

Fuyi Li, Chen Li, Tatiana T. Marquez-Lago, Andre Leier, Tatsuya Akutsu, Anthony W. Purcell, A. Ian Smith, Trevor Lithgow, Roger J. Daly, Jiangning Song, Kuo-Chen Chou

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleResearchpeer-review

142 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Motivation: Kinase-regulated phosphorylation is a ubiquitous type of post-translational modification (PTM) in both eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells. Phosphorylation plays fundamental roles in many signalling pathways and biological processes, such as protein degradation and protein-protein interactions. Experimental studies have revealed that signalling defects caused by aberrant phosphorylation are highly associated with a variety of human diseases, especially cancers. In light of this, a number of computational methods aiming to accurately predict protein kinase family-specific or kinase-specific phosphorylation sites have been established, thereby facilitating phosphoproteomic data analysis. Results: In this work, we present Quokka, a novel bioinformatics tool that allows users to rapidly and accurately identify human kinase family-regulated phosphorylation sites. Quokka was developed by using a variety of sequence scoring functions combined with an optimized logistic regression algorithm. We evaluated Quokka based on well-prepared up-to-date benchmark and independent test datasets, curated from the Phospho.ELM and UniProt databases, respectively. The independent test demonstrates that Quokka improves the prediction performance compared with state-of-the-art computational tools for phosphorylation prediction. In summary, our tool provides users with high-quality predicted human phosphorylation sites for hypothesis generation and biological validation. Availability and implementation: The Quokka webserver and datasets are freely available at http://quokka.erc.monash.edu/. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Original languageEnglish
Article numberbty522
Pages (from-to)4223-4231
Number of pages9
JournalBioinformatics
Volume34
Issue number24
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15 Dec 2018

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