Figure 1

Reducing the protein representation. (A) Replacing the secondary structure elements (SSEs) by vectors retaining the information about the SSEs direction type (α-helix or β-sheet; indicated by red and blue colors). (B) Dispensing with the information about the SSE length and layout in space, leaves the representation consisting of unit vectors of two types, or, equivalently, points of two possible types on a unit sphere. The additional information missing from the illustration is the vectors' sequential order, carried over from the ordering of the SSEs on the protein sequence. All illustrations in this work were produced using PyMOL [DeLano, W.L. (2002) http://pymol.org] and POV-Ray [Persistence of vision raytracer (version 3.6, 2004) http://povray.org].