Characterization and comparison of protein structures. Part II - Comparison

The Fourier methods are applied to the pairwise comparison of C-alpha-backb ones in protein structures. The technique allows to assess both the general similarity and the main origins of resemblance (coincident periodicities, similarity of fragments, or large-scale semblance of folding). The analogou s methods can be extended to the study of correlations between the structur al characteristics for the C-alpha-backbone of one protein and the distribu tion of physico-chemical parameters along the primary amino acid sequence f or the other. Finally, we discuss the problem of clusterization of pairwise data into tree-like hierarchical system. (C) 1999 Academic Press.