Protein function is closely intertwined with protein structure. Discovery of meaningful structure-function relationships is of utmost importance in protein biochemistry and has led to creation of high-quality, manually curated classification databases, such as the gold-standard SCOP (Structural Classification of Proteins) database. The SCOP database and its counterparts such as CATH provide a detailed and comprehensive description of the structural and evolutionary relationships of the proteins of known structure and are widely employed in structural and computational biology. Since manual classification is both subjective and highly laborious, automated classification of novel structures is increasingly an active area of research. The design of methods for automated structure classification has been rendered even more important since the recent past, due to the explosion in number of solved structures arising out of various structural biology initiatives. In this paper we propose an approach to the problem of structure classification based on creating and tessellating low dimensional maps of the protein structure space (MPSS). Given a set of protein structures, an MPSS is a low dimensional embedding of structural similarity-based distances between the molecules. In an MPSS, a group of proteins (such as all the proteins in the PDB or sub-samplings thereof) under consideration are represented as point clouds and structural relatedness maps to spatial adjacency of the points. In this paper we present methods and results that show that MPSS can be used to create tessellations of the protein space comparable to the clade systems within SCOP. Though we have used SCOP as the gold standard, the proposed approach is equally applicable for other structural classifications.
Pubmed ID: 24564500 RIS Download
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Web server for flexible protein structure comparison. Structure alignment is formulated as the aligned fragment pairs chaining process allowing at most t twists, and the flexible structure alignment is transformed into a rigid structure alignment when t is forced to be 0.
View all literature mentionsTHIS RESOURCE IS NO LONGER IN SERVICE. Documented on February 28,2023.Software as a stand-alone reference implementation for the Relaxed Neighbor Joining (RNJ) algorithm. Used in distance-based phylogenetic tree reconstruction method to process large sequence datasets.
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