Research article

Structural similarity of loops in protein families: toward the understanding of protein evolution

Anna R Panchenko and Thomas Madej

Computational Biology Branch, National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20894, USA

author email corresponding author email

BMC Evolutionary Biology 2005, 5:10doi:10.1186/1471-2148-5-10

Published:	3 February 2005

Abstract

Background

Protein evolution and protein classification are usually inferred by comparing protein cores in their conserved aligned parts. Structurally aligned protein regions are separated by less conserved loop regions, where sequence and structure locally deviate from each other and do not superimpose well.

Results

Our results indicate that even longer protein loops can not be viewed as "random coils" and for the majority of protein families in our test set there exists a linear correlation between the measures of sequence similarity and loop structural similarity. Results suggest that distance matrices derived from the loop (dis)similarity measure may produce in some cases more reliable cluster trees compared to the distance matrices based on the conventional measures of sequence and structural (dis)similarity.

Conclusions

We show that by considering "dissimilar" loop regions rather than only conserved core regions it is possible to improve our understanding of protein evolution.