Large Block Matching Characters for Dehydrin Classification

Dehydrins are a type of modular, disordered stress protein in plants. They are typically defined by the presence of three motifs called Y-, K-, and S-segments. Their disordered structure and relatively free sequence form make identifying dehydrins a difficult problem. Identification of stress proteins is part of the effort to make the food supply secure in the face of climate change. In this study we used a block-matching character based feature finding method on the do-what‘s-possible representation to distinguish dehydrins from synthetic sequences with the same fourth-order statistics. Good separation is achieved and sets the stage for attempting to locate additional dehydrins and dehydrin-like proteins. The minimum block matching size is found to be a critical parameter.