'Protein Peeling': an approach for splitting a 3D protein structure into compact fragments.

Bioinformatics

INSERM U726, Equipe de Bioinformatique Génomique and Moléculaire (EBGM), Université Denis Diderot-Paris 7, case 7113, 75251 Paris Cedex 05, France.

Published: January 2006

Motivation: The object of this study is to propose a new method to identify small compact units that compose protein three-dimensional structures. These fragments, called 'protein units (PU)', are a new level of description to well understand and analyze the organization of protein structures. The method only works from the contact probability matrix, i.e. the inter Calpha-distances translated into probabilities. It uses the principle of conventional hierarchical clustering, leading to a series of nested partitions of the 3D structure. Every step aims at dividing optimally a unit into 2 or 3 subunits according to a criterion called 'partition index' assessing the structural independence of the subunits newly defined. Moreover, an entropy-derived squared correlation R is used for assessing globally the protein structure dissection. The method is compared to other splitting algorithms and shows relevant performance.

Availability: An Internet server with dedicated tools is available at http://www.ebgm.jussieu.fr/~gelly/

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Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/bti773DOI Listing

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