Protein classification using functional motifs as sub-structures of active site

Abstract

Different kinds of techniques exist for discovering the functionally important regions in proteins. Techniques based on the primary structure of the protein perform sequence comparison to identify the functionally important regions. Sequence based techniques cannot be applied for discovering these regions when the sequence similarity fall below a certain threshold. Evolutionary techniques generate consensus sequences to identify the common ancestor of the protein and use the consensus sequences to identify these regions. Structure based techniques consists of many different approaches of using the structural information to identify these regions. The limitations of the structure based techniques are that they fail to use the structure of the active site for identifying the functionally important regions. A new technique is presented in the thesis that uses the structure of the active site for identifying these regions.