Molecular mimicry: Quantitative methods to study structural similarity between protein and RNA

With rapidly increasing availability of three-dimensional structures, one major challenge for the post-genome era is to infer the functions of biological molecules based on their structural similarity. While quantitative studies of structural similarity between the same type of biological molecules (e.g., protein vs. protein) have been carried out intensively, the comparable study of structural similarity between different types of biological molecules (e.g., protein vs. RNA) remains unexplored. Here we have developed a new bioinformatics approach to quantitatively study the structural similarity between two different types of biopolymers - proteins and RNA - based on the spatial distribution of conserved elements. We applied it to two previously proposed tRNA-protein mimicry pairs whose functional relatedness between two molecules has been recently determined experimentally. Our method detected the biologically meaningful signals, which are consistent with experimental evidence.