Predicting post-translational lysine acetylation using support vector machines

Lysine acetylation is a post-translational protein modification and a primary regulatory mechanism that controls many cell signaling processes. Lysine acetylation sites are recognized by acetyltransferases and deacetylases through sequence patterns (motifs). Recently, we used high-resolution mass spectrometry to identify 3600 lysine acetylation sites on 1750 human proteins covering most of the previously annotated sites and providing the most comprehensive acetylome so far. This dataset should provide an excellent source to train support vector machines (SVMs) allowing the high accuracy in silico prediction of acetylated lysine residues.