Application of Structural MNA Descriptors to Constructing the Profiles of Protein Families

摘要

A new approach to constructing the profiles of protein families is proposed, in which amino acids are represented by sets of MNA (multilevel neighborhoods of atoms) descriptors, and a multiple alignment for constructing a profile is formed by pairwise spatial superpositions of protein structures. The similarity of sequences to a family profile was evaluated by comparing sets of MNA descriptors. The applicability of such an approach to predicting the function of a protein from its amino acid sequence was analyzed. The profiles of the protein families of trypsin, subtilisin, and cytochrome P450 were calculated, and profile matches were searched in the SWISSPROT database. The results obtained showed that the approach proposed can be applied to solving problems of functional annotation of proteins from amino acid sequences.