Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on November 14, 2005
Bioinformatics 2006 22(2):129-133; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/bti773
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Protein Peeling: an approach for splitting a 3D protein structure into compact fragments

1INSERM U726, Equipe de Bioinformatique Génomique & Moléculaire (EBGM), Université Denis DiderotParis 7 case 7113, 75251 Paris Cedex 05, France
2UMR CNRS 7602, Institut de Minéralogie et Physique des Milieux Condensés (IMPMC), Université Pierre & Marie Curie 4, Place Jussieu, 75252 Paris Cedex 05, France
*To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Motivation: The object of this study is to propose a new method to identify small compact units that compose protein three-dimensional structures. These fragments, called protein units (PU), are a new level of description to well understand and analyze the organization of protein structures. The method only works from the contact probability matrix, i.e. the inter C
-distances translated into probabilities. It uses the principle of conventional hierarchical clustering, leading to a series of nested partitions of the 3D structure. Every step aims at dividing optimally a unit into 2 or 3 subunits according to a criterion called partition index assessing the structural independence of the subunits newly defined. Moreover, an entropy-derived squared correlation R is used for assessing globally the protein structure dissection. The method is compared to other splitting algorithms and shows relevant performance.
Availability: An Internet server with dedicated tools is available at http://www.ebgm.jussieu.fr/~gelly/
Contact: debrevern{at}ebgm.jussieu.fr.
Received on September 2, 2005; revised on October 19, 2005; accepted on November 8, 2005
This article has been cited by other articles:
![]() |
J.-C. Gelly, C. Etchebest, S. Hazout, and A.G. de Brevern Protein Peeling 2: a web server to convert protein structures into series of protein units. Nucleic Acids Res., July 1, 2006; 34(Web Server issue): W75 - W78. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
||||
