Association Research on Potassium Channel Subtypes and Functional Sites

Abstract

Potassium channels, a goup of membrane proteins and found in virtually all cells, are of crucial physiological importance for understanding cell biology and channelopathy. Studying the association of channel subtypes with their functional sites, and mining the functional sites mostly relevant to channel subtypes, can not only enhance molecular classification of potassium channels but only provide some clues for the functional targets. Here, we proposed to use functional sites profiles as features, where the functional sites are often used to characterize ion channels in biomedical research domains. We employed a novel integrated decision method to recognize the functional sites subset that is mostly relevant to the differentiation of potassium channel subtypes.