Protein supporting structure discovery by rigid structure identification via one-dimensional structural signature

Protein function is highly correlated with its three-dimensional conformation in order to interact with others proteins, ligands, substrates, inhibitors, etc. Studies on binding site and protein function have been investigated to understand the mechanism of protein activity. The role of binding site can be characterized by the presence of stable regions and flexible regions. Furthermore, protein stability and flexibility play different roles on protein functions. In this work, we propose the framework to discover protein supporting structure by identifying rigid regions among different structure of same/similar proteins. By encoding spatial information of protein structure into structural signature, we can reduce comparison time without losing accuracy, in comparison with the time complexity of structure comparison using geometric hashing approach. Our results reveal that supporting structure can be discovered in selected enzyme families. Moreover, supporting structure plays different roles depend on the mechanism of protein activity of protein family.