Solubility-Weighted Index: fast and accurate prediction of protein solubility

Motivation Recombinant protein production is a widely used technique in the biotechnology and biomedical industries, yet only a quarter of target proteins are soluble and can therefore be purified. Results We have discovered that global structural flexibility, which can be modeled by normalised B-factors, accurately predicts the solubility of 12,216 recombinant proteins expressed in Escherichia coli. We have optimised B-factors, and derived a new set of values for solubility scoring that further improves prediction accuracy. We call this new predictor the ‘Solubility-Weighted Index’ (SWI). Importantly, SWI outperforms many existing protein solubility prediction tools. Furthermore, we have developed ‘SoDoPE’ (Soluble Domain for Protein Expression), a web interface that allows users to choose a protein region of interest for predicting and maximising both protein expression and solubility. Availability The SoDoPE web server and source code are freely available at https://tisigner.com/sodope and https://github.com/Gardner-BinfLab/TISIGNER-ReactJS, respectively. The code and data for reproducing our analysis can be found at https://github.com/Gardner-BinfLab/SoDoPE_paper2020.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  bioRxiv

• Publication date

  2020-02-16

• Fields of study

  Biology, Materials Science, Chemistry, Computer Science, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa578PMID 32559287PMCID 7750957
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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