F-Curve, a Graphical Representation of Protein Sequences for Similarity Analysis Based on Physicochemical Properties of Amino Acids

We introduce a new graphical representation of protein sequences based on two selected physicochemical properties of amino acids. Using the two physicochemical properties of amino acids, we firstly obtain a 2D discrete point set for amino acids of a protein sequence. Then we use fractal interpolation method to interpolate these discrete points to represent protein sequences. Next we employ the fractal dimension of protein curves images to analyze the similarity of protein sequences by comparing the distance of vectors. The ND5 protein sequence of nine species is an example to demonstrate our method. We finally use a linear correlation and significance analysis to compare our results and some other graphical representation results with the ClustalW results. The compared results show that our proposed method is effective for the similarity analysis of proteins.