Protein Motif Discovery and Function Classification

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Title: "Protein Motif Discovery and Function Classification"

by

Miss GAO Yuan

Abstract:

Structural motifs, consisting of a few residues, often determine the
functions of proteins. This makes motifs an effective tool for protein
function classification. In this paper, we present an extension of a
general-purpose motif discovery method that improves the efficiency of the
top-ranking candidate motifs by modifying the similarity function which
measures the similarity between two substructures. We calculate the
similarity based on the type of the amino acids and linearly combine the
similarity measure function with the similarity scoring function from
previous work. We have evaluated our method on cytochrome P450 reductases,
NiSOD, the Trypsin-like superfamily, the Aldolase superfamily and the
Glycosidase superfamily, and have found several possible motif structures
that give high accuracy in classification experiments.


Date		:  May 15, 2009

Time		:  2:45pm - 3:30pm

Venue		:  Room 3405

Advisor		:  Prof. D.Y. Yeung

2nd Reader	:  Dr. James Kwok


*************** All are welcome *******************