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Current Bioinformatics

Editor-in-Chief

ISSN (Print): 1574-8936
ISSN (Online): 2212-392X

Characterization of Graphs for Protein Structure Modeling and Recognition of Solubility

Author(s): Lorenzo Livi, Alessandro Giuliani and Alireza Sadeghian

Volume 11, Issue 1, 2016

Page: [106 - 114] Pages: 9

DOI: 10.2174/1574893611666151109175216

Price: $65

Abstract

This paper deals with the relations among structural, topological, and chemical properties of the E. coli proteome from the vantage point of the solubility/aggregation propensity of proteins. Each E. coli protein is initially represented according to its known folded 3D shape. This step involves representing the available E. coli proteins in terms of graphs. We first analyze those graphs by considering pure topological characterizations, i.e., by analyzing the mass fractal dimension and the distribution underlying both shortest paths and vertex degrees. Results confirm the general architectural principles of proteins. Successively, we focus on the statistical properties of a representation of such graphs in terms of vectors composed of several numerical features, which we extracted from their structural representation. We found that protein size is the main discriminator for the solubility, while however there are other factors that help explaining the solubility degree. We finally analyze such data through a novel one-class classifier, with the aim of discriminating among very and poorly soluble proteins. Results are encouraging and consolidate the potential of pattern recognition techniques when employed to describe complex biological systems.

Keywords: Protein analysis, graph representation, descriptors and complexity measures for graphs, one-class classification.

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