Simple and concise representations of protein-folding patterns provide powerful abstractions for visualizations, comparisons, classifications, searching and aligning structural data. Structures are often abstracted by replacing standard secondary structural features—that is, helices and strands of sheet—by vectors or linear segments. Relying solely on standard secondary structure may result in a significant loss of structural information. Further, traditional methods of simplification crucially depend on the consistency and accuracy of external methods to assign secondary structures to protein coordinate data. Although many methods exist automatically to identify secondary structure, the impreciseness of definitions, along with errors and inconsistencies in experimental structure data, drastically limit their applicability to generate reliable simplified representations, especially for structural comparison.
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