Tertiary Structure Matching based on Geometrical Features

Abstract

Protein function can be determined from the significant amino acids sequence and also three dimensional (3-D) structures. Between the options of choosing either the sequence or 3-D structures, geometrical shapes contained by 3-D give more meaning into the protein's function because in molecular biology, proteins with similar structures normally have the same functions. The research focuses on studying methods in protien structure matching. The matching is between a query structure (protein with unknown function) and a potential group of target protein structures (with known function) from local database. Referring to the fact that proteins exhibiting same function are likely to share some similarity in their 3-D structures, what we expect in the matching result is that; query structure might adopt a same function with the target structure with highest similarity to the query structure.