SUMO Substrates and Sites Prediction Combining Pattern Recognition and Phylogenetic Conservation

Abstract

Small Ubiquitin-related modifier (SUMO) proteins are widely expressed in eukaryotic cells, which are reversibly coupled to their substrates by motif recognition, called sumoylation. Two interesting questions are 1) how many potential SUMO substrates may be included in mammalian proteomes, such as human and mouse, 2) and given a SUMO substrate, can we recognize its sumoylation sites? To answer these two questions, previous prediction systems of SUMO substrates mainly adopted the pattern recognition methods, which could get high sensitivity with relatively too many potential false positives. So we use phylogenetic conservation between mouse and human to reduce the number of potential false positives.