A statistical model of protein sequence similarity and function similarity reveals overly-specific function predictions.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Predicting protein function from primary sequence is an important open problem in modern biology. Not only are there many thousands of proteins of unknown function, current approaches for predicting function must be improved upon. One problem in particular is overly-specific function predictions which we address here with a new statistical model of the relationship between protein sequence similarity and protein function similarity.

Methodology

Our statistical model is based on sets of proteins with experimentally validated functions and numeric measures of function specificity and function similarity derived from the Gene Ontology. The model predicts the similarity of function between two proteins given their amino acid sequence similarity measured by statistics

SUBMITTER: Louie B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2760442 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature