Predição de estrutura de proteína por homologia assistida por ontologia.

Abstract

Protein structure prediction is a process in Molecular Biology by way of which the 3D structure of a protein is determined based on known structures of other proteins. This is an important process because the structure of a protein is a determinant factor for its function in the cell. Knowing a protein s structure allows scientists to describe the kind of activity that the protein performs in the cell and to develop drugs to treat diseases. The prediction process is based on similarity between the amino acid sequences that form proteins: the structure of a target protein is predicted by re-using knowledge on proteins whose structures are already determined and whose amino acid sequences are similar to the former s. Therefore, knowledge reuse occurs in the process of predicting protein structure, but without employing a domain ontology. In this work, we apply a technique of ontology-driven knowledge re-use in protein structure prediction aiming at improving the prediction process in its efficiency and in the quality of the obtained structures. An experiment has been carried out in which the technique was applied to predict the structure of 286 target sequences. There has been improvement as well as loss of quality of predicted structures, whereas a run time performance gain in 38% of the target structures was observed.