1 / 11

Alpha Shapes and molecular Representations

Alpha Shapes and molecular Representations. Research Project CSC/MATH 870 SPRING 2007 Philipp Richter. Introduction. Motivation for Alpha Shapes Researcher in structural biology need to know the shape of molecules, like proteins, that consist of possibly thousands of atoms

craig-hurley
Download Presentation

Alpha Shapes and molecular Representations

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Alpha Shapes and molecular Representations Research Project CSC/MATH 870 SPRING 2007 Philipp Richter

  2. Introduction • Motivation for Alpha Shapes • Researcher in structural biology need to know the shape of molecules, like proteins, that consist of possibly thousands of atoms • But why proteins? “prota” is Greek and means “of primary importance”. They are essential to all living organisms and were first mentioned in 1838 by Jöns Jakob Berzelius, a Swedish researcher

  3. Introduction • Proteins are assembled from amino acids using information encoded in genes You should now be able to smell some of the applications • Try to fit molecules together • Calculate volume or area of molecule

  4. Introduction • Structural data about molecules is publicly available • Protein Data Bank www.rcsb.org/pdb • General: www.ChemDB.com • others

  5. Introduction • This data only describes the participating atoms / molecules and their relative location in space

  6. Introduction • But researchers need more: • Solvent Accessible Surface • Molecular Surface

  7. Introduction • Here is how we do it: • We use Alpha-Shapes, which are a generalization of Convex-Hulls • They take the “working environment” of the molecule into account • Applet: http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca

  8. The Project • Study available algorithms and implementations • Apply to different point sets in 2D and 3D • Explore the problem of applying these to data from public databases (as mentioned before)

  9. Progress by now • Studied background theory • Looked for libraries and applets that compute alpha shapes • Looked at file format of PDB

  10. To be done • More studying of background theory • Study implementations • Determine interesting point sets • Related to real molecules • Apply available implementations • Determine how data from public databases can be processed using current implementations • Comment on how an ideal implementation using those public databases would need to look like

  11. References [1] Protein Wikipedia 02/14/07 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein [2] Lydia E. Kavraki, Molecular Shapes and Surfaces [3] Molecular Shapes & Surfaces 02/14/07 http://cnx.org/content/m11616/latest/

More Related