Characterization and Comparison of Protein Structures. Part II—Comparison

The Fourier methods are applied to the pairwise comparison of Cα-backbones in protein structures. The technique allows to assess both the general similarity and the main origins of resemblance (coincident periodicities, similarity of fragments, or large-scale semblance of folding). The analogous methods can be extended to the study of correlations between the structural characteristics for the Cα-backbone of one protein and the distribution of physico-chemical parameters along the primary amino acid sequence for the other. Finally, we discuss the problem of clusterization of pairwise data into tree-like hierarchical system.