Résumé
Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) have proved to be powerful for protein domain identification. However, numerous domains may be missed in highly divergent proteins. This is the case for the proteins of Plasmodium falciparum, the main causal agent of human malaria. Here, we propose a method that uses domain co-occurrence to increase the sensitivity of the approach while controlling its false discovery rate. Applied to P. falciparum, our method identify (with an error rate below 20%) 482 new domains (versus 3482 in PlasmoDB), which involve 158 new GO annotations.