prPred: A Predictor to Identify Plant Resistance Proteins by Incorporating k-Spaced Amino Acid (Group) Pairs

To infect plants successfully, pathogens adopt various strategies to overcome their physical and chemical barriers and interfere with the plant immune system. Plants deploy a large number of resistance (R) proteins to detect invading pathogens. The R proteins are encoded by resistance genes that contain cell surface-localized receptors and intracellular receptors. In this study, a new plant R protein predictor called prPred was developed based on a support vector machine (SVM), which can accurately distinguish plant R proteins from other proteins. Experimental results showed that the accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, MCC, and AUC of prPred were 0.935, 1.000, 0.806, 1.000, 0.893, 0.857, and 0.948, respectively, on an independent test set. Moreover, the predictor integrated the HMMscan search tool and Phobius to identify protein domain families and transmembrane protein regions to differentiate subclasses of R proteins. prPred is available at https://github.com/Wangys-prog/prPred. The tool requires a valid Python installation and is run from the command line.