Abstract
Computational prediction of ion channels facilitates the identification of putative ion channels from protein sequences. Several predictors of ion channels and their types were developed in the last quindecennial. While they offer reasonably accurate predictions, they also suffer a few shortcomings including lack of availability, parallel prediction mode, single-label prediction (inability to predict multiple channel subtypes), and incomplete scope (inability to predict subtypes of the voltage-gated channels). We developed a first-of-its-kind PSIONplus(m) method that performs sequential multi-label prediction of ion channels and their subtypes for both voltage-gated and ligand-gated channels. PSIONplus(m) sequentially combines the outputs produced by three support vector machine-based models from the PSIONplus predictor and is available as a webserver. Empirical tests show that PSIONplus(m) outperforms current methods for the multi-label prediction of the ion channel subtypes. This includes the existing single-label methods that are available to the users, a naïve multi-label predictor that combines results produced by multiple single-label methods, and methods that make predictions based on sequence alignment and domain annotations. We also found that the current methods (including PSIONplus(m)) fail to accurately predict a few of the least frequently occurring ion channel subtypes. Thus, new predictors should be developed when a larger quantity of annotated ion channels will be available to train predictive models.