Aligning discovered patterns from protein family sequences

A basic task in protein analysis is to discover a set of sequence patterns that characterizes the function of a protein family. To address this task, we introduce a synthesized pattern representation called Aligned Pattern (AP) Cluster to discover potential functional segments in protein sequences. We apply our algorithm to identify and display the binding segments for the Cytochrome C. and Ubiquitin protein families. The resulting AP Clusters correspond to protein binding segments that surround the binding residues. When compared to the results from the protein annotation databases, PROSITE and pFam, ours are more efficient in computation and comprehensive in quality. The significance of the AP Cluster is that it is able to capture subtle variations of the binding segments in protein families. It thus could help to reduce time-consuming simulations and experimentation in the protein analysis.