Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access originally published online on May 8, 2009
Nucleic Acids Research 2009 37(Web Server issue):W363-W368; doi:10.1093/nar/gkp299
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Nucleic Acids Research, 2009, Vol. 37, No. suppl_2 W363-W368
© 2009 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Articles |
ClanTox: a classifier of short animal toxins
1Computer Science and Engineering, 2Department of Biological Chemistry, Institute of Life Sciences, The Sudarsky Center for Computational Biology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel and 3Blais Proteomics Center, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA 02115, USA
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +972 2 6585425; Fax: +972 2 6586448; Email: michall{at}cc.huji.ac.il
Received January 18, 2009. Revised March 22, 2009. Accepted April 15, 2009.
Toxins are detected in sporadic species along the evolutionary tree of the animal kingdom. Venomous animals include scorpions, snakes, bees, wasps, frogs and numerous animals living in the sea such as the stonefish, snail, jellyfish, hydra and more. Interestingly, proteins that share a common scaffold with animal toxins also exist in non-venomous species. However, due to their short length and primary sequence diversity, these, toxin-like proteins remain undetected by classical search engines and genome annotation tools. We construct a toxin classification machine and web server called ClanTox (Classifier of Animal Toxins) that is based on the extraction of sequence-driven features from the primary protein sequence followed by the application of a classification system trained on known animal toxins. For a given input list of sequences, from venomous or non-venomous settings, the ClanTox system predicts whether each sequence is toxin-like. ClanTox provides a ranked list of positively predicted candidates according to statistical confidence. For each protein, additional information is presented including the presence of a signal peptide, the number of cysteine residues and the associated functional annotations. ClanTox is a discovery-prediction tool for a relatively overlooked niche of toxin-like cell modulators, many of which are therapeutic agent candidates. The ClanTox web server is freely accessible at http://www.clantox.cs.huji.ac.il.