Advanced Graph Mining Methods for Protein Analysis

As one of the primary substances in a living organism, protein defines the character of each cell by interacting with the cellular environment to promote T&F Cat # C6847 Chapter: 6 page: 111 date: August 5, 2009 T&F Cat # C6847 Chapter: 6 page: 112 date: August 5, 2009 the cell’s growth and function [1]. Previous studies on proteomics indicate that the functions of different proteins could be assigned based upon protein structures [2,3]. The knowledge on protein structures gives us an overview of protein fold space and is helpful for the understanding of the evolutionary principles behind structure. By observing the architectures and topologies of the protein families, biological processes can be investigated more directly with much higher resolution and finer detail. For this reason, the analysis of protein, its structure and the interaction with the other materials is emerging as an important problem in bioinformatics. However, the determination of protein structures is experimentally expensive and time consuming. This makes scientists largely dependent on sequence rather than more general structure to infer the function of the protein at the present time. For this reason, data mining technology is introduced into this area to provide more efficient data processing and knowledge discovery approaches.