Application of a sensitive collection heuristic for very large protein families: evolutionary relationship between adipose triglyceride lipase (ATGL) and classic mammalian lipases.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Manually finding subtle yet statistically significant links to distantly related homologues becomes practically impossible for very populated protein families due to the sheer number of similarity searches to be invoked and analyzed. The unclear evolutionary relationship between classical mammalian lipases and the recently discovered human adipose triglyceride lipase (ATGL; a patatin family member) is an exemplary case for such a problem.

Results

We describe an unsupervised, sensitive sequence segment collection heuristic suitable for assembling very large protein families. It is based on fan-like expanding, iterative database searches. To prevent inclusion of unrelated hits, additional criteria are introduced: minimal alignment length and overlap with starting se

SUBMITTER: Schneider G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1435942 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature