COMPLEMENTARY CLASSIFICATION APPROACHES FOR PROTEIN SEQUENCES

We have studied five methods of protein classification and have applie d them to the 768 groups of related proteins in the PROSITE catalog. F our of these methods are based on searching a database of blocks, and the other uses the frequently occurring moths found in the protein fam ilies combined with a fingerprint technique, Our experimental results show that the block-based methods perform well when taking into accoun t the probability of amino acids occurring in a block, Furthermore, th e five methods give information that is complementary to each other, T hus, using the five methods together, one can obtain high confidence c lassifications (if the results agree) or suggest alternative hypothese s (if the results disagree), We also list those proteins whose current families documented in the PROSITE catalog differ from those suggeste d by our results, There are remarkably few of them, which is a testimo ny to the quality of PROSITE.