Abstract
In this work, we are interested in the localization of proteins transported towards the endoplasmic reticulum membrane, and more specifically to the recognition of transmembrane segments and signal peptides. By using the last knowledges acquired on the mechanisms of insertion of a segment in the membrane, we propose a discrimination method of these two types of sequences based on the potential of insertion of each amino acid in the membrane. This leads to search for each amino acid a curve giving its potential of insertion according to its place in a window corresponding to the thickness of the membrane. Our goal is to determine "in silico" a curve for each amino acid to obtain the best performances for our method of classification. The optimization, on data sets constructed from data banks of proteins, of the curves is a difficult problem that we address through the meta-heuristic methods. We first present a local search algorithm for learning a set of curves. Its assessment on the different data sets shows good classification results. However, we notice a difficulty in adjusting the curves of certain amino acids. The restriction of the search space with relevant information on amino acids and the introduction of multiple neighborhood allow us to improve the performances of our method and at the same time to stabilize the learnt curves. We also developed a genetic algorithm to explore in a more diversified way the space of search for this problem.