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Abstract:
Biologists regularly search databases of DNA or protein sequences for evolutionary or functional relationships to a given query sequence. We describe a ranking algorithm that exploits the entire network structure of similarity relationships among proteins in a sequence database by performing a diffusion operation on a pre-computed, weighted network. The resulting ranking algorithm, evaluated using a human-curated database of protein structures, is efficient and provides significantly better rankings than a local network search algorithm such as PSI-BLAST.