Title:Alz-Disc: A Tool to Discriminate Disease-causing and Neutral Mutations in
Alzheimer's Disease
Volume: 26
Issue: 4
Author(s): A. Kulandaisamy, S. Akila Parvathy Dharshini and M. Michael Gromiha*
Affiliation:
- Department of Biotechnology, Bhupat and Jyoti Mehta School of BioSciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras,
Chennai 600 036, Tamilnadu, India
Keywords:
Mutations, Alzheimer, neurodegenerative disorder, disease-causing, discrimination, web server.
Abstract:
Background: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disorder
that affects the neuronal system and leads to memory loss. Many coding gene variants are associated
with this disease and it is important to characterize their annotations.
Methods: We collected the Alzheimer's disease-causing and neutral mutations from different databases.
For each mutation, we computed the different features from protein sequence. Further, these
features were used to build a Bayes network-based machine-learning algorithm to discriminate between
the disease-causing and neutral mutations in AD.
Results: We have constructed a comprehensive dataset of 314 Alzheimer's disease-causing and 370
neutral mutations and explored their characteristic features such as conservation scores, positionspecific
scoring matrix (PSSM) profile, and the change in hydrophobicity, different amino acid residue
substitution matrices and neighboring residue information for identifying the disease-causing
mutations. Utilizing these features, we have developed a disease-specific tool named Alz-disc, for
discriminating the disease-causing and neutral mutations using sequence information alone. The
performance of the present method showed an accuracy of 89% for independent test set, which is
13% higher than available generic methods. This method is freely available as a web server at
https://web.iitm.ac.in/bioinfo2/alzdisc/.
Conclusions: This study is useful to annotate the effect of new variants and develop mutation specific
drug design strategies for Alzheimer’s disease.