IDP–CRF: Intrinsically disordered protein/region identification based on conditional random fields

Accurate prediction of intrinsically disordered proteins/regions is one of the most important tasks in bioinformatics, and some computational predictors have been proposed to solve this problem. How to efficiently incorporate the sequence-order effect is critical for constructing an accurate predictor because disordered region distributions show global sequence patterns. In order to capture these sequence patterns, several sequence labelling models have been applied to this field, such as conditional random fields (CRFs). However, these methods suffer from certain disadvantages. In this study, we proposed a new computational predictor called IDP–CRF, which is trained on an updated benchmark dataset based on the MobiDB database and the DisProt database, and incorporates more comprehensive sequence-based features, including PSSMs (position-specific scoring matrices), kmer, predicted secondary structures, and relative solvent accessibilities. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset and two independent datasets show that IDP–CRF outperforms 25 existing state-of-the-art methods in this field, demonstrating that IDP–CRF is a very useful tool for identifying IDPs/IDRs (intrinsically disordered proteins/regions). We anticipate that IDP–CRF will facilitate the development of protein sequence analysis.