Sequence Search Algorithm Assessment and Testing Toolkit (SAT)

Abstract

Motivation: The Sequence Search Algorithm Assessment and Testing Toolkit (SAT) aims to be a complete package for the comparison of different protein homology search algorithms. The structural classification of proteins can provide us with a clear criterion for judgement in homology detection. There have been several assessments based on structural sequences with classifications but a good deal of similar work is now being repented with locally developed procedures and programs. The SAT will provide developers with a complete package which will save time and produce more comparable performance assessments for search algorithms. The package is complete in the sense that it provides a non-redundant large sequence resource database, a well-characterized query database of proteins domains, all the parsers and some previous results from PSI-BLAST and a hidden markov model algorithm. Results: An analysis on two different data sets was carried out using the SAT package. It compared rite performance of a full protein sequence database (RSDB100) with a non-redundant representative sequence database derived from it (RSDB50). The performance measurement indicated that the full database is sub-optimal for a homology search. This result justifies the use of much smaller and faster RSDB50 than RSDB100 for the SAT.