Electrical & Computer Engineering, Department of
ORCID IDs
Date of this Version
2010
Citation
BMC Bioinformatics 2010, 11:428
Abstract
Background: Phylogenetic analysis can be used to divide a protein family into subfamilies in the absence of experimental information. Most phylogenetic analysis methods utilize multiple alignment of sequences and are based on an evolutionary model. However, multiple alignment is not an automated procedure and requires human intervention to maintain alignment integrity and to produce phylogenies consistent with the functional splits in underlying sequences. To address this problem, we propose to use the alignment-free Relative Complexity Measure (RCM) combined with reduced amino acid alphabets to cluster protein families into functional subtypes purely on sequence criteria. Comparison with an alignment-based approach was also carried out to test the quality of the clustering.
Results: We demonstrate the robustness of RCM with reduced alphabets in clustering of protein sequences into families in a simulated dataset and seven well-characterized protein datasets. On protein datasets, crotonases, mandelate racemases, nucleotidyl cyclases and glycoside hydrolase family 2 were clustered into subfamilies with 100% accuracy whereas acyl transferase domains, haloacid dehalogenases, and vicinal oxygen chelates could be assigned to subfamilies with 97.2%, 96.9% and 92.2% accuracies, respectively.
Conclusions: The overall combination of methods in this paper is useful for clustering protein families into subtypes based on solely protein sequence information. The method is also flexible and computationally fast because it does not require multiple alignment of sequences.
Comments
© 2010 Albayrak et al
Open access
doi:10.1186/1471-2105-11-428