NLS (Nuclear Localization Signal) Prediction (MOLECULAR BIOLOGY AND INFORMATION?Biological Information Science)

Abstract

The nucleus of eukaryotic cells contains many nuclear proteins that function for delivery of molecular information between cytosol and nucleus, and for control of gene expression. After the synthesis on the ribosomes in the cytoplasm, these proteins enter the nucleus through pore complexes in the nuclear envelope. Nuclear proteins are transported into the nucleus, if they contain nuclear localization signals (NLSs). In this work we developed a method that predicts a location of NLS on a query protein sequence by computational analysis. We employed Hidden Markov Model (HMM) in our method to find NLSs in the amino acid sequences. The prediction performance was assessed by leave-one-out cross-validation.