Super-secondary structures and modeling of protein folds

Current Approaches in Supersecondary Structures Investigation

Proteins expressed during the cell cycle determine cell function, topology, and responses to environmental influences. The development and improvement of experimental methods in the field of structural biology provide valuable information about the structure and functions of individual proteins. This work is devoted to the study of supersecondary structures of proteins and determination of their structural motifs, description of experimental methods for their detection, databases, and repositories for storage, as well as methods of molecular dynamics research. The interest in the study of supersecondary structures in proteins is due to their autonomous stability outside the protein globule, which makes it possible to study folding processes, conformational changes in protein isoforms, and aberrant proteins with high productivity.

Universal Architectural Concepts Underlying Protein Folding Patterns

What is the architectural “basis set” of the observed universe of protein structures? Using information-theoretic inference, we answer this question with a dictionary of 1,493 substructures—called concepts—typically at a subdomain level, based on an unbiased subset of known protein structures. Each concept represents a topologically conserved assembly of helices and strands that make contact. Any protein structure can be dissected into instances of concepts from this dictionary. We dissected the Protein Data Bank and completely inventoried all the concept instances. This yields many insights, including correlations between concepts and catalytic activities or binding sites, useful for rational drug design; local amino-acid sequence–structure correlations, useful for ab initio structure prediction methods; and information supporting the recognition and exploration of evolutionary relationships, useful for structural studies. An interactive site, Proçodic, at http://lcb.infotech.monash.edu.au/prosodic (click), provides access to and navigation of the entire dictionary of concepts and their usages, and all associated information. This report is part of a continuing programme with the goal of elucidating fundamental principles of protein architecture, in the spirit of the work of Cyrus Chothia.

Structural motifs in which β-strands are clipped together with the П-like module

In this study, the structural motifs that can be represented as combinations of small motifs such as β-hairpins, S-, and Z-like β-sheets and βαβ-units, and the П-like module are described and analyzed. The П-module consists of connected elements of the β-strand-loop-β-strand type arranged in space so that its overall fold resembles a clip or the Greek letter П. In proteins, the П-module itself and the structural motifs containing it exhibit unique overall folds and have specific sequence patterns of the key hydrophobic, hydrophilic and glycine residues. All this together enables us to conclude that these structural motifs can fold independently of the remaining part of the molecule and can act as nuclei and/or "ready-made" building blocks in protein folding.

Extension of the classical classification of β-turns

The functional properties of a protein primarily depend on its three-dimensional (3D) structure. These properties have classically been assigned, visualized and analysed on the basis of protein secondary structures. The β-turn is the third most important secondary structure after helices and β-strands. β-turns have been classified according to the values of the dihedral angles φ and ψ of the central residue. Conventionally, eight different types of β-turns have been defined, whereas those that cannot be defined are classified as type IV β-turns. This classification remains the most widely used. Nonetheless, the miscellaneous type IV β-turns represent 1/3^rd of β-turn residues. An unsupervised specific clustering approach was designed to search for recurrent new turns in the type IV category. The classical rules of β-turn type assignment were central to the approach. The four most frequently occurring clusters defined the new β-turn types. Unexpectedly, these types, designated IV₁, IV₂, IV₃ and IV₄, represent half of the type IV β-turns and occur more frequently than many of the previously established types. These types show convincing particularities, in terms of both structures and sequences that allow for the classical β-turn classification to be extended for the first time in 25 years.

Compact Structure Patterns in Proteins

Globular proteins typically fold into tightly packed arrays of regular secondary structures. We developed a model to approximate the compact parallel and antiparallel arrangement of α-helices and β-strands, enumerated all possible topologies formed by up to five secondary structural elements (SSEs), searched for their occurrence in spatial structures of proteins, and documented their frequencies of occurrence in the PDB. The enumeration model grows larger super-secondary structure patterns (SSPs) by combining pairs of smaller patterns, a process that approximates a potential path of protein fold evolution. The most prevalent SSPs are typically present in superfolds such as the Rossmann-like fold, the ferredoxin-like fold, and the Greek key motif, whereas the less frequent SSPs often possess uncommon structure features such as split β-sheets, left-handed connections, and crossing loops. This complete SSP enumeration model, for the first time, allows us to investigate which theoretically possible SSPs are not observed in available protein structures. All SSPs with up to four SSEs occurred in proteins. However, among the SSPs with five SSEs, approximately 20% (218) are absent from existing folds. Of these unobserved SSPs, 80% contain two or more uncommon structure features. To facilitate future efforts in protein structure classification, engineering, and design, we provide the resulting patterns and their frequency of occurrence in proteins at: http://prodata.swmed.edu/ssps/.