What is the sift-PULpredict website?
Sift-PULpredict provides online service for PUL (polysaccharide utilization loci) prediction and function annotation. The major difference between sift-PULpredit and other websites or tools (dbCAN-seq, PULdb, PULpy and CGCs) is that polysaccharide backbone degrading CAZymes (PBD-CAZymes) were considered as the most important signature. This is mainly to avoid false positives caused by non-PBD-CAZymes, especially glycosidases, e.g. PUL with xylosidase may target at xylan, any xylose branched polysaccharides and xylose.
Is sift-PULpredict reliable?
In a dataset containing 179 positive dataset and 191 negative dataset, our method has 95.0% accuracy with 62.7% recovery rate. Therefore, it should be useful for users who showed interest in one or several polysaccharides.
Which substrates could be predicted ?
In current version, sift-PULpredict could only predict PULs targeting at 10 polysaccharides, including alpha glucan, alpha mannan, alginate, agar, beta mannan, cellulose, chitin, carrageenan, pectin and xylan. Mucin, fructan and glycosamineglycan were temporarily not included because their variable backbone structure.
Please note that, Sift-PULpredict cannot predict PULs containing only glycosidases or PULs whose members have no similarity to characterized proteins.