11 November Theo: “A structure-sequence algorithm for matching protein molecules”

Analysis of protein shapes is a major topic in biochemistry, since it can define the functions of a protein molecule. Evaluating the similarity of proteins can help in identifying the functions of a newly discovered protein or determining the evolutionary distance between them. In this talk we describe a method for matching two or more protein molecules, using a likelihood that depends both on the structure and sequence information from a protein. Also, we show how our approach can be used to estimate the evolutionary distance between proteins.