Discovering co-occurring patterns and their biological significance in protein families

BACKGROUND: The large influx of biological sequences poses the importance of identifying and correlating conserved regions in homologous sequences to acquire valuable biological knowledge. These conserved regions contain statistically significant residue associations as sequence patterns. Thus, patterns from two conserved regions co-occurring frequently on the same sequences are inferred to have joint functionality. A method for finding conserved regions in protein families with frequent co-occurrence patterns is proposed. The biological significance of the discovered clusters of conserved regions with co-occurrences patterns can be validated by their three-dimensional closeness of amino acids and the biological functionality found in those regions as supported by published work. METHODS: Using existing algorithms, we discovered statistically significant amino acid associations as sequence patterns. We then aligned and clustered them into Aligned Pattern Clusters (APCs) corresponding to conserved regions with amino acid conservation and variation. When one APC frequently co-occured with another APC, the two APCs have high co-occurrence. We then clustered APCs with high co-occurrence into what we refer to as Co-occurrence APC Clusters (Co-occurrence Clusters). RESULTS: Our results show that for Co-occurrence Clusters, the three-dimensional distance between their amino acids is closer than average amino acid distances. For the Co-occurrence Clusters of the ubiquitin and the cytochrome c families, we observed biological significance among the residing amino acids of the APCs within the same cluster. In ubiquitin, the residues are responsible for ubiquitination as well as conventional and unconventional ubiquitin-bindings. In cytochrome c, amino acids in the first co-occurrence cluster contribute to binding of other proteins in the electron transport chain, and amino acids in the second co-occurrence cluster contribute to the stability of the axial heme ligand. CONCLUSIONS: Thus, our co-occurrence clustering algorithm can efficiently find and rank conserved regions that contain patterns that frequently co-occurring on the same proteins. Co-occurring patterns are biologically significant due to their three-dimensional closeness and other evidences reported in literature. These results play an important role in drug discovery as biologists can quickly identify the target for drugs to conduct detailed preclinical studies.