Image Compression-based Approach to Measuring the Similarity of Protein Structures

This paper proposes series of methods for measuring the similarity of protein structures. In the proposed methods, an original protein structure is transformed into a distance matrix, which is regarded as a two-dimensional image. Then, the similarity of two protein structures is measured by a kind of compression ratio of the concatenated image. We employed several image compression algorithms: JPEG, GIF, PNG, IFS, and SPC, and audio compression algorithms: MP3 and FLAC. We applied the proposed method to clustering of protein structures. The results of computational experiments suggest that SPC has the best performance.