Identification of Conserved Domain Combinations in S.cerevisiae Proteins

In this paper, we propose a formulated method for the analysis of conserved domain combinations and report an overview of domain combinations by identifying domain patterns and analyzing their functional annotations. The proposed method measures co-occurrence frequency and mutual dependency of domains in a domain combination using association rules. The method is useful to estimate the meaningfulness of a given domain combination in terms of conservation. Using the method, we extracted domain patterns in S.cerevisiae proteins and investigated GO term annotations of the domains. According to the investigation, domains in S.cerevisiae proteins are turned out to form patterns in which the members of the patterns are highly affiliated to one another. Also, extracted patterns are revealed to have a tendency of being associated with molecular functions.