FEATURE-EXTRACTION FROM ENDOPEPTIDASE CLEAVAGE SITES IN MITOCHONDRIALTARGETING PEPTIDES

Cleavage sites in nuclear-encoded mitochondrial protein targeting pept ides (mTPs) from mammals, yeast, and plants have been analysed for cha racteristic physicochemical features using statistical methods, percep trons, multilayer neural networks, and self-organizing feature maps, T hree different sequence motifs were found, revealing loosely defined a rginine motifs with Arg in positions -10, -3, and -2. A self-organizin g feature map was able to cluster these three types of endopeptidase t arget sites but did not identify any species-specific characteristics in mTPs, Neural networks were used to define local sequence features a round precursor cleavage sites. (C) 1998 Wiley-Liss, Inc.