Enhanced partial order curve comparison over multiple protein folding trajectories.

Understanding how proteins fold is essential to our quest in discovering how life works at the molecular level. Current computation power enables researchers to produce a huge amount of folding simulation data. Hence there is a pressing need to be able to interpret and identify novel folding features from them. In this paper, we model each folding trajectory as a multi-dimensional curve. We then develop an effective multiple curve comparison (MCC) algorithm, called the enhanced partial order (EPO) algorithm, to extract features from a set of diverse folding trajectories, including both successful and unsuccessful simulation runs. Our EPO algorithm addresses several new challenges presented by comparing high dimensional curves coming from folding trajectories. A detailed case study of applying our algorithm to a miniprotein Trp-cage(24) demonstrates that our algorithm can detect similarities at rather low level, and extract biologically meaningful folding events.