A neural network dynamics that resembles protein evolution

We use neutral networks to classify proteins according to their sequence similarities. A network composed by 7 × 7 neurons, was trained with the Kohonen unsupervised learning algorithm using, as inputs, matrix patterns derived from the bipeptide composition of cytochrome c proteins belonging to 76 different species. As a result of the training, the network self-organized the activation of its neurons into topologically ordered maps, wherein phylogenetically related sequences were positioned close to each other. The evolution of the topological map during learning, in a representative computational experiment, roughly resembles the way in which one species evolves into several others. For instance, sequences corresponding to vertebrates, initially grouped together into one neuron, were placed in a contiguous zone of the final neural map, with sequences of fishes, amphibia, reptiles, birds and mammals associated to different neurons. Some apparent wrong classifications are due to the fact that some proteins have a greater degree of sequence identity than the one expected by phylogenetics. In the final neural map, each synaptic vector may be considered as the pattern corresponding to the ancestor of all the proteins that are attached to that neuron. Although it may be also tempting to link real time with learning epochs and to use this relationship to calibrate the molecular evolutionary clock, this is not correct because the evolutionary time schedule obtained with the neural network depends highly on the discrete way in which the winner neighborhood is decreased during learning.