Construction of a Three-Dimensional Motif Dictionary for Protein Structural Data Mining

With the rapidly increasing number of proteins of which three-dimensional (3D) structures are known, the protein structure database is one of the key elements in many attempts being made to derive the knowledge of structure-function relationships of proteins. In this work, the authors have developed a software tool to assist in constructing the 3D protein motif dictionary that is closely related to the PROSITE sequence motif database. In the PROSITE, a structural feature called motif is described by a sequence pattern of amino acid residues with the regular expression defined in the database. The present system allows us to automatically find the related sites for all the 3D protein structures taken from a protein structure database such as the Protein Data Bank (PDB), and to make a dictionary of the 3D motifs related to the PROSITE sequence motif patterns. A computational trial was carried out for a subset of the PDB's structure data file. The structural feature analysis resulted with the tool showed that there are many different 3D motif patterns but having a particular PROSITE sequence pattern. For this reason, the authors also tried to classify the 3D motif patterns into several groups on the basis of distance similarity matrix, and to determine a representative pattern for each group in preparing the dictionary. The usefulness of the additional approach for preparing the 3D motif dictionary is also discussed with an illustrative example.