Characterization of Graphs for Protein Structure Modeling and Recognition of Solubility

Title:Characterization of Graphs for Protein Structure Modeling and Recognition of Solubility

Volume: 11 Issue: 1

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

Affiliation:

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

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.

Cite this article as:

Livi Lorenzo, Giuliani Alessandro and Sadeghian Alireza, Characterization of Graphs for Protein Structure Modeling and Recognition of Solubility, Current Bioinformatics 2016; 11 (1) . https://dx.doi.org/10.2174/1574893611666151109175216