Building a parallel between structural and topological properties

Abstract

In this chapter, we study the amino acid interaction networks. An amino acid interaction network is a graph whose vertices are the protein's amino acids and whose edges are the interactions between them. Using a graph theory approach, we identify a number of properties of these networks. Some of them are common to all proteins, while others depend on the structure arrangement. We rely on the latter group of properties to illustrate the correlation between structural and topological properties. Then, we propose a topological space where proteins from a same family tend to be grouped. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.