Computational Biology CB_W0002

Title : A Demonstration of Clustering in Protein Contact Maps for Alpha Helix Pairs
Author : Robert Fraser and Janice Glasgow
Year : 2007
Place of publish : springerlink
Abstract :

 The purpose of this work is to demonstrate that it is possible to cluster contact maps for pairs of alpha helices such that each of the clusters corresponds to a group of pairs of alpha helices with similar properties. The property of the configuration of helix pairs that was chosen for study is the packing attribute. The contact maps are compared to one another using a novel contact map comparison scheme based upon the locations of contacts in the contact maps. A k-nearest neighbours technique is used to perform the clustering, and the cosine between vectors corresponding to contact map regions was the distance metric. The clustering of contact maps to determine whether maps corresponding to similar packing values are placed into the same clusters yielded promising results.
This research has supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the PRECARN Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IRIS).