Approaches for Protein Surface Curvature Analysis
Virginio Cantoni, Riccardo Gatti, Luca Lombardi

Keywords: protein-protein interaction, surface labeling, curvature analysis, heat diffusion, structural bioinformatics, computational biology

Abstract: The determination of protein function is a very expensive and time consuming process. The development of computational techniques to guide the experimental process is an important step for biological analysis. The goal of the activity presented here is to discover complementary regions (i.e. with concave and convex segments that match each other) among different proteins. In particular, we are considering the first step of this process: the segmentation of the protein surface in protuberances and inlets through the analysis of convexity and concavity. To this end, two approaches will be described with a few comparative assessments in terms of accuracy and speed of execution with other techniques proposed in the literature.