Characterization of Subcellular Localization Signals Using HYPOTHESISCREATOR

Abstract

Proteins are first synthesized in the cytosol and then carried to specified locations of the cell. The information which determines where the proteins are carried is believed to be encoded in the amino acid sequence. Mitochondrial targeting peptides (mTP), chloroplast targeting peptides (cTP), signal peptide, are some of the known targeting signals. Our approach differs from previous methods [5, 1, 2] which try to characterize these signals in that we try to extract a simple rule or knowledge which may be easily understood. In our experiments, we use an alphabet indexing combined with string pattern matching, similar to [6]. Concerning mitochondrial targeting peptides, we have succeeded in discovering a simple rule which seems to capture important biological knowledge about the signals.