The Protein Family Classification in Protein Databases via Entropy Measures

Abstract

In the present work, we review the fundamental methods which have been developed in the last few years for classifying into families and clans the distribution of amino acids in protein databases. This is done through functions of random variables, the Entropy Measures of probabilities of occurrence of the amino acids. An intensive study of the Pfam databases is presented with restrictions to families which could be represented by rectangular arrays of amino acids with m rows (protein domains) and n columns (amino acids). This work is also an invitation to scientific research groups worldwide to undertake the statistical analysis with different numbers of rows and columns since we believe in the mathematical characterization of the distribution of amino acids as a fundamental insight on the determination of protein structure and evolution.