We describe the design and implementation of a fast topology–based method
for protein structure comparison. The approach uses the TOPS topological representation
of protein structure, aligning two structures using a common discovered
pattern and generating measure of distance derived from an insert score. Heavy
use is made of a constraint-based pattern matching algorithm for TOPS diagrams
that we have designed and described elsewhere Gilbert et al. (1999). The comparison
system is maintained at the European Bioinformatics Institute and is available
over the Web via the at tops.ebi.ac.uk/tops. Users submit a structure description in
Protein Data Bank (PDB) format and can compare it with structures in the entire
PDB or a representative subset of protein domains, receiving the results by email
