Protein structure mining using a structural alphabet

We present a comprehensive evaluation of a new structure mining method called PB‐ALIGN. It is based on the encoding of protein structure as 1D sequence of a combination of 16 short structural motifs or protein blocks (PBs). PBs are short motifs capable of representing most of the local structural features of a protein backbone. Using derived PB substitution matrix and simple dynamic programming algorithm, PB sequences are aligned the same way amino acid sequences to yield structure alignment. PBs are short motifs capable of representing most of the local structural features of a protein backbone. Alignment of these local features as sequence of symbols enables fast detection of structural similarities between two proteins. Ability of the method to characterize and align regions beyond regular secondary structures, for example, N and C caps of helix and loops connecting regular structures, puts it a step ahead of existing methods, which strongly rely on secondary structure elements. PB‐ALIGN achieved efficiency of 85% in extracting true fold from a large database of 7259 SCOP domains and was successful in 82% cases to identify true super‐family members. On comparison to 13 existing structure comparison/mining methods, PB‐ALIGN emerged as the best on general ability test dataset and was at par with methods like YAKUSA and CE on nontrivial test dataset. Furthermore, the proposed method performed well when compared to flexible structure alignment method like FATCAT and outperforms in processing speed (less than 45 s per database scan). This work also establishes a reliable cut‐off value for the demarcation of similar folds. It finally shows that global alignment scores of unrelated structures using PBs follow an extreme value distribution. PB‐ALIGN is freely available on web server called Protein Block Expert (PBE) at http://bioinformatics.univ‐reunion.fr/PBE/. Proteins 2008. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.