Flexible Alignments for Protein Threading

We present a new local alignment method for the protein threading problem. Local sequence-sequence alignments are widely used to find functionally important regions in families of proteins. However, to the best of our knowledge, no local sequence-structure alignment algorithm has been described in the literature. Here we model local alignments as Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) models. These models permit to align a part of a protein structure onto a protein sequence in order to detect local similarities. The paper describes two MIP models, compares and analyzes their performance by using ILOG CPLEX 10 solver