Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2011

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MS

College

Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

Department

Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Committee Chair

Donald Adjeroh

Abstract

A novel descriptor to characterize protein surfaces, and hence classify functionally similar proteins into functional families is proposed. The descriptor exploits the protein tertiary structure surface, locally and globally, to identify intra-family proteins. By using only sparse data based on the C-alpha atoms on the protein surface, we characterize the surface using different invariant descriptors, namely, distance distributions, residue co-occurrences, and distance-residue co-occurrences between all atoms confined to a particular patch. Using the method, proteins with very low sequence similarity were successfully classified into their functional families with a high degree of accuracy.

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