Automated Enzyme Classification by Formal Concept Analysis

Enzymes are molecules with a catalytic activity that make them essential for any biochemical reaction. High throughput genomic technics give access to the protein sequence of new enzymes found in living organisms. Guessing the enzyme functional activity from its sequence is a crucial task that can be approached by comparing the new sequences with those of already known enzymes labeled by a family class. This task is difficult because the activity is based on a combination of small sequence patterns and sequences greatly evolved over time. This paper presents a classifier based on the identification of common subsequence blocks between known and new enzymes and the search of formal concepts built on the cross product of blocks and sequences for each class. Since new enzyme families may emerge, it is important to propose a first classification of enzymes that cannot be assigned to a known family. FCA offer a nice framework to set the task as an optimization problem on the set of concepts. The classifier has been tested with success on a particular set of enzymes present in a large variety of species, the haloacid dehalogenase superfamily.