Title

Surface characterization of proteins using multi-fractal property of heat-denatured aggregates

Authors

Tapobrata Lahiri^{1, *}, Hrishikesh Mishra¹, Subrata Sarkar¹, Krishna Misra²

Affiliation

¹Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad, India; ²Centre of Biotechnology, University of Allahabad, Allahabad, India

Email

tlahiri@iiita.ac.in; * Corresponding author

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

received March 07, 2008; revised May 05, 2008; accepted May 31, 2008; published June 23, 2008

Abstract

Multi-fractal property of heat-denatured protein aggregates (HDPA) is characteristic of its individual form. The visual similarity between digitally generated microscopic images of HDPA with that of surface-image of its individual X-ray structures in protein databank (PDB) displayed using Visual Molecular Dynamics (VMD) viewer is basis of the study. We deigned experiments to view the fractal nature of proteins at different aggregate scales. Intensity based multi-fractal dimensions (ILMFD) extracted from various planes of digital microscopic images of protein aggregates were used to characterize HDPA into different classes. Moreover, the ILMFD parameters extracted from aggregates show similar classification pattern to digital images of protein surface displayed by VMD viewer using PDB entry. We discuss the use of irregular patterns of heat-denatured aggregate proteins to understand various surface properties in native proteins.

Keywords

protein structure; multi-fractal dimension; protein aggregate; digital image processing; light microscopy; degree of differentiation; graphical pair-wise class comparison

Citation

Lahiri et al., Bioinformation 2(9): 379-383 (2008)

Edited by

P. Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.