: One of the most evident achievements of bioinformatics is the development of methods that transfer biological knowledge from characterised proteins to uncharacterised sequences. This mode of protein function assignment is mostly based on the detection of sequence similarity and the premise that functional properties are conserved during evolution. Most automatic approaches developed to date rely on the identification of clusters of homologous proteins and the mapping of new proteins onto these clusters, which are expected to share functional characteristics. Here, we inverse the logic of this process, by considering the mapping of sequences directly to a functional classification. In this mode, the starting point is a database of labelled proteins according to a functional classification scheme, and the subsequent use of sequence similarity allows to define the membership of new proteins to these functional classes. In this framework, we define the Correspondence Indicators as measur...
Emmanuel D. Levy, Christos A. Ouzounis, Walter R.