It is widely understood that protein functions can be exhaustively described in terms of no single parameter, whether this be amino acid sequence or the three-dimensional structure of the underlying protein molecule. This means that a number of different attributes must be used to create an ontology of protein functions. Certainly much of the required information is already stored in databases ...

We present a method, called equivalence learning, which applies a two-class classification approach to object-pairs defined within a multi-class scenario. The underlying idea is that instead of classifying objects into their respective classes, we classify object pairs either as equivalent (belonging to the same class) or non-equivalent (belonging to different classes). The method is based on a...

1 The need for accurate, automated protein classification methods continues to increase as advances in biotechnology uncovers new proteins at a fast rate. G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) are a particularly difficult superfamily of proteins to classify due to the extreme diversity among its members; yet, they are an important subject in pharmacological research being the target of approximat...

Nowadays, the number of protein sequences being stored in central protein databases from labs all over the world is constantly increasing. From these proteins only a fraction has been experimentally analyzed in order to detect their structure and hence their function in the corresponding organism. The reason is that experimental determination of structure is labor-intensive and quite time-consu...

A neural network classification method is developed as an alternative approach to the large database search/organization problem. The system, termed Protein Classification Artificial Neural System (ProCANS), has been implemented on a Cray supercomputer for rapid superfamily classification of unknown proteins based on the information content of the neural interconnections. The system employs an ...