Similarity of Amyloid Protein Motif using an Hybrid Intelligent System

The main objective of this research is to define and develop a comparison method of regular expressions, and apply it to amyloid proteins. In general, the biological problem that we study is concerning the search for similarities between non-homologous protein families, using regular expressions, with the goal of discover and identify specific regions conserved in the protein sequence, and in this way determine that proteins have a common origin. From the computer point of view, the problem consists of comparison of protein motifs expressed using regular expressions. A motif is a small region in a previously characterized protein, with a functional or structural significance in the protein sequence. In this work we proposed a hybrid method of motifs comparison based on the Genetic Programming, to generate the populations derived from every regular expression under comparison, and the Backpropagation Artificial Neural Network, for the comparison between them. The method of motifs comparison is tested using the database AMYPdb, and it allows discover possible similarities between amyloid families.