Protein tyrosine kinases (PTKs) play a central role in the modulation of a wide variety of cellular events such as differentiation, proliferation and metabolism, and their unregulated activation can lead to various diseases including cancer and diabetes. PTKs represent a diverse family of proteins including both receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs) and non-receptor tyrosine kinases (NRTKs). Due to the diversity and important cellular roles of PTKs, accurate classification methods are required to better understand and differentiate different PTKs. In addition, PTKs have become important targets for drugs, providing a further need to develop novel methods to accurately classify this set of important biological molecules. Here, we introduce a novel statistical model for the classification of PTKs that is based on their struc-tural features. The approach allows for both the recognition of PTKs and the classification of RTKs into their subfamilies. This novel approach had an overall accuracy of 98.5% for the identification of PTKs, and 99.3% for the classification of RTKs.

Keywords: classification, motifs and transmembrane domain, profile hidden Markov model, protein tyrosine kinase, receptor tyrosine kinase