Three-dimensional protein model similarity analysis based on salient shape index

BACKGROUND: Proteins play a special role in bioinformatics. The surface shape of a protein, which is an important characteristic of the protein, defines a geometric and biochemical domain where the protein interacts with other proteins. The similarity analysis among protein models has become an important topic of protein analysis, by which it can reveal the structure and the function of proteins. RESULTS: In this paper, a new protein similarity analysis method based on three-dimensional protein models is proposed. It constructs a feature matrix descriptor for each protein model combined by calculating the shape index (SI) and the related salient geometric feature (SGF), and then analyzes the protein model similarity by using this feature matrix and the extended grey relation analysis. CONCLUSIONS: We compare our method to the Multi-resolution Reeb Graph (MRG) skeleton method, the L1-medial skeleton method and the local-diameter descriptor method. Experimental results show that our protein similarity analysis method is accurate and reliable while keeping the high computational efficiency.