Title
Fast overlapping of protein contact maps by alignment of eigenvectors
Abstract
Motivation: Searching for structural similarity is a key issue of protein functional annotation. The maximum contact map overlap (CMO) is one of the possible measures of protein structure similarity. Exact and approximate methods known to optimize the CMO are computationally expensive and this hampers their applicability to large-scale comparison of protein structures. Results: In this article, we describe a heuristic algorithm (Al-Eigen) for finding a solution to the CMO problem. Our approach relies on the approximation of contact maps by eigendecomposition. We obtain good overlaps of two contact maps by computing the optimal global alignment of few principal eigenvectors. Our algorithm is simple, fast and its running time is independent of the amount of contacts in the map. Experimental testing indicates that the algorithm is comparable to exact CMO methods in terms of the overlap quality, to structural alignment methods in terms of structure similarity detection and it is fast enough to be suited for large-scale comparison of protein structures. Furthermore, our preliminary tests indicates that it is quite robust to noise, which makes it suitable for structural similarity detection also for noisy and incomplete contact maps. Availability: Available at http://bioinformatics.cs.unibo.it/Al-Eigen Contact: dilena@cs.unibo.it Supplementary information:Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1093/bioinformatics/btq402
Bioinformatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
eigenvectors
Structural alignment,Experimental testing,Computer science,Heuristic (computer science),Pairwise sequence alignment,Structural similarity,Eigendecomposition of a matrix,Bioinformatics,Eigenvalues and eigenvectors
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
26
18
1367-4803
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
10
0.60
25
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Pietro Di Lena122519.34
Piero Fariselli285196.03
Luciano Margara336746.16
Marco Vassura4596.21
Rita Casadio51032108.10