On Using Fuzzy Contact Maps for Protein Structure Comparison

Abstract

The comparison of protein structures is an important problem in bioinformatics, and soft computing techniques were recently introduced for achieving a better representation and potentially, for getting better solving strategies. We focus here in the generalized maximum fuzzy contact map overlap model for analyzing the impact of the fuzzy contact map's definition, and the relation between the crisp and fuzzy costs. Surprisingly, we detected some situations where solving the fuzzy model gave better results in terms of crisp values than solving the crisp model directly.