Algorithmic Aspects of Protein Structure Similarity

  • Authors:
  • Deborah Goldman;Christos H. Papadimitriou;Sorin Istrail

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • FOCS '99 Proceedings of the 40th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

We show that calculating contact map overlap (a measure of similarity of protein structures) is NP-hard, but can be solved in polynomial time for several interesting and relevant special cases. We identify an important special case of this problem corresponding to self-avoiding walks, and prove a decomposition theorem and a corollary approximation result for this special case. These are the first approximation algorithms with guaranteed error bounds, and NP-completeness results in the literature in the area of protein structure alignment/fold recognition for measures of structure similarity of practical interest.