On searching for the active sites in proteins and peptide hormones

An essential part of structure-functional studies of proteins is the search for sites responsible for specific functional activity. The information theory can be of much help in such a search. According to this theory, rarely occurring oligomers contain more information and thus are more likely to take part in forming the active site. We used frequencies of occurrences of amino acids (mean and for each polypeptide) to search for clusters of highly informative amino acids by the moving window smoothing method. In 16 out of 19 peptide hormones such sequences were active sites known from literature.