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Published on: December 12, 2013
Reduced amino acid alphabets exhibit an improved sensitivity and selectivity in fold assignment
Eric L Peterson1, Jané Kondev, Julie A Theriot
1Department of Physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.
Using reduced amino acid alphabets can improve protein fold recognition. These simplified alphabets, grouping similar amino acids, often outperform full alphabets in sequence alignment and detecting structurally similar proteins with low sequence identity.
Area of Science:
- Biochemistry
- Structural Biology
- Bioinformatics
Background:
- Many proteins with dissimilar sequences share common structural folds.
- Reduced amino acid alphabets group similar amino acids, aiding sequence analysis.
- This study explores reduced alphabets for enhanced protein fold recognition.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the effectiveness of reduced amino acid alphabets in protein fold recognition.
- To compare the performance of various reduced alphabets against full alphabets in sequence alignment.
- To assess the sensitivity of reduced alphabets in identifying structurally similar proteins with low sequence identity.
Main Methods:
- Tested over 150 amino acid clustering schemes.
- Performed all-versus-all pairwise sequence alignments using the Distance Matrix Alignment database.
- Evaluated performance using metrics like mean precision, ROC curve area, and recall.
Main Results:
- Reduced alphabets frequently outperformed full alphabets in sequence alignment tasks.
- Reduced alphabets achieved performance comparable to full alphabets in correct pairwise alignment.
- Reduced alphabets demonstrated increased sensitivity for detecting structural similarity in sequences with low identity.
Conclusions:
- Reduced amino acid alphabets offer a viable and often superior alternative to full alphabets for protein fold recognition.
- These findings suggest potential performance gains when applying reduced alphabets to more advanced methods like profile and pattern searches.
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