Representation for Discovery of Protein Motifs

Proceedings of the First International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, 1993

Volume

Proceedings of the First International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, 1993

Contents

There are several dimensions and levels of complexity in which information on protein motifs may be available. For example, onedimensional sequence motifs may be associated with secondary structure identifiers. Alternatively, three-dimensional information on polypeptide segments may be used to induce prototypical three-dimensional structure templates. This paper surveys various representations encountered in the protein motif discovery literature. Many of the representations are based on incompatible semantics, making difficult the comparison and combination of previous results. To make better use of machine learning techniques and to provide for an integrated knowledge representation framework, a general representation language -- in which all types of motifs can be encoded and given a uniform semantics -- is required. In this paper we propose such a model, called a spatial description logic, and present a machine learning approach based on the model.