Fig. 5

PIC and gzip compression ratios (using integer precision reduction for both methods as suggested by [23] for comparability) for the proteins compressed in Table 1 plotted against the number of atoms that make up the compressed protein. All but the smallest proteins showed a higher compression ratio when using PIC; for the small proteins, the extra overhead of PIC dominates, but for any large protein, PIC performs better. Note that this comparison is fair to gzip, as instead of gzipping the original files, we only apply gzip after using the same lossy precision encoding that PIC uses; thus, the comparison here is really between sequential storage of a text file using gzip, and spherical storage using PIC