Protein Structure Alignment

A **Structural alignment** attempts to establish equivalences between two or more polymer structures based on their shape and three-dimensional conformation. In contrast to simple structural superposition (see below), where at least some equivalent residues of the two structures are known, structural alignment requires no a priori knowledge of equivalent positions.

Structural alignment is a valuable tool for the comparison of proteins with low sequence similarity, where evolutionary relationships between proteins cannot be easily detected by standard sequence alignment techniques. Structural alignment can therefore be used to imply evolutionary relationships between proteins that share very little common sequence. However, caution should be exercised when using the results as evidence for shared evolutionary ancestry, because of the possible confounding effects of convergent evolution by which multiple unrelated amino acid sequences converge on a common tertiary structure.

For more info see the Wikipedia article on [protein structure alignment](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_alignment).

BioJava comes with implementations of the Combinatorial Extension (CE) and FATCAT algorithms. Both algorithms come in two variations, as such one can say that BioJava supports the following four algorithms

The mapping between PDB and UniProt changes over time, due to the dynamic nature of biological data. The [PDBe](http://www.pdbe.org) has a project that provides up-to-date mappings between the two databases, the [SIFTs](http://www.ebi.ac.uk/pdbe/docs/sifts/) project.