Web Information System Design for Fast Protein Post-Translational Modification Site Prediction

In the field of bioinformatics, the protein Post-Translational Modification (PTM) site prediction has been widely studied and Web Information Systems (WIS) has been deployed by researchers for this task. Through a literature review and benchmarking process, we identified the requirements which included quick predictions, efficient memory usage, and input validations. However, no detailed designs have been proposed so far, which may have contributed to some requirements not being implemented in some of the websites. Therefore, we propose a detailed WIS conceptual design, which can be used for predicting the sites of multiple PTM types, equipped with a validation algorithm and compared the usage of various string searching algorithms as well as file storage formats. Experiment results showed that the linear search algorithm is the fastest for this task and storing the protein data in npz format when performing multi-PTMs site prediction can assist in reducing memory usage. The proposed design can be implemented into user-friendly web tools that are both efficient in speed and memory usage in future studies.