Comparison of protein structures using 3D profile alignment.

A novel method for protein structure comparison using 3D profile alignment is presented. The 3D profile is a position-dependent scoring matrix derived from three-dimensional structures and is basically used to estimate sequence-structure compatibility for prediction of protein structure. Our idea is to compare two 3D profiles using a dynamic programming algorithm to obtain optimal alignment and a similarity score between them. When the 3D profile of hemoglobin was compared with each of the profiles in the library, which contained 325 profiles of representative structures, all the profiles of other globins were detected with relatively high scores, and proteins in the same structural class followed the globins. Exhaustive comparison of 3D profiles in the library was also performed to depict protein relatedness in the structure space. Using multidimensional scaling, a planar projection of points in the protein structure space revealed an overall grouping in terms of structural classes, i.e., all-alpha, all-beta, alpha/beta, and alpha+beta. These results differ in implication from those obtained by the conventional structure-structure comparison method. Differences are discussed with respect to the structural divergence of proteins in the course of molecular evolution.