  One of the most powerful techniques to study protein structures is to look
for recurrent fragments (also called substructures or spatial motifs), then use
them as patterns to characterize the proteins under study. An emergent trend
consists in parsing proteins three-dimensional (3D) structures into graphs of
amino acids. Hence, the search of recurrent spatial motifs is formulated as a
process of frequent subgraph discovery where each subgraph represents a spatial
motif. In this scope, several efficient approaches for frequent subgraph
discovery have been proposed in the literature. However, the set of discovered
frequent subgraphs is too large to be efficiently analyzed and explored in any
further process. In this paper, we propose a novel pattern selection approach
that shrinks the large number of discovered frequent subgraphs by selecting the
representative ones. Existing pattern selection approaches do not exploit the
domain knowledge. Yet, in our approach we incorporate the evolutionary
information of amino acids defined in the substitution matrices in order to
select the representative subgraphs. We show the effectiveness of our approach
on a number of real datasets. The results issued from our experiments show that
our approach is able to considerably decrease the number of motifs while
enhancing their interestingness.
