Protein Retrieval by Matching 3d Surfaces

Folding into complex 3D structures, protein molecules are responsible for carrying out nearly all of the essential functions in living cells by properly binding to other molecules with a number of chemical bonds connecting neighboring atoms. Locations of these atoms are called the binding sites. To help biologists identify the functions of unknown proteins and to discover new functions of known proteins, it is desirable to retrieve common binding sites among proteins. We propose to use the geometric hashing method to perform protein surface matching to identify similar binding sites. Furthermore, two techniques, α-hull and 3D reference frames, are adopted to reduce the complex computation.