A Parallel Algorithm for Molecular Surface Matching Through Image Representation

An emerging application field for structure matching is related to in silico studies of molecular biology: considering that protein function is mainly related to its external morphology, the possibility to match macromolecular surfaces is very important to infer information about the interaction of biological components. In this work we present a parallel algorithm based on images of local description, originally designed for object recognition in robotics, which has been adapted to identify surface complementarities for screening the interaction possibilities of biological macromolecules. The results obtained show the good discrimination power of the proposed approach, coupled with high performance figures.