SURPRISING SIMILARITIES IN STRUCTURE COMPARISON

Examination of a protein's structural 'neighbors' can reveal distant e volutionary relationships that are otherwise undetectable, and perhaps suggest unsuspected functional properties. In the past, such analyses have often required specialized software and computer skills, but new structural comparison methods, developed in the past two years, incre asingly offer this opportunity to structural and molecular biologists in general. These methods are based on similarity-search algorithms th at are fast enough to have effectively removed the computer-time limit ation for structure-structure search and alignment, and have made it p ossible for several groups to conduct systematic comparisons of all pu blicly available structures, and offer this information via the World Wide Web. Furthermore, and perhaps surprisingly given the difficulty o f the structure-comparison problem, these groups seem to have converge d on quite similar approaches with respect to both fast search algorit hms and the identification of statistically significant similarities.