Accurate Prediction of Docked Protein Structure Similarity

Methods for Detecting Critical Residues in Proteins

In proteins, certain amino acids may play a critical role in determining their structure and function. Examples include flexible regions, which allow domain motions, and highly conserved residues on functional interfaces, which play a role in binding and interaction with other proteins. Detecting these regions facilitates the analysis and simulation of protein rigidity and conformational changes, and aids in characterizing protein-protein binding. We present a protocol that combines graph-theory rigidity analysis and machine-learning-based methods for predicting critical residues in proteins. Our approach combines amino-acid specific information and data obtained by two complementary methods. One method, KINARI, performs graph-based analysis to find rigid clusters of amino acids in a protein, while the other method relies on evolutionary conservation scores to find functional interfaces in proteins. Our machine learning model combines both methods, in addition to amino acid type and solvent-accessible surface area.

Protein-protein interactions: scoring schemes and binding affinity

Protein-protein interactions mediate several cellular functions, which can be understood from the information obtained using the three-dimensional structures of protein-protein complexes and binding affinity data. This review focuses on computational aspects of predicting the best native-like complex structure and binding affinities. The first part covers the prediction of protein-protein complex structures and the advantages of conformational searching and scoring functions in protein-protein docking. The second part is devoted to various aspects of protein-protein interaction thermodynamics, such as databases for binding affinities and other thermodynamic parameters, computational methods to predict the binding affinity using either the three-dimensional structures of complexes or amino acid sequences, and change in binding affinities of the complexes upon mutations. We provide the latest developments on protein-protein docking and binding affinity studies along with a list of available computational resources for understanding protein-protein interactions.

Machine Learning Approaches for Predicting Protein Complex Similarity

Discriminating native-like structures from false positives with high accuracy is one of the biggest challenges in protein-protein docking. While there is an agreement on the existence of a relationship between various favorable intermolecular interactions (e.g., Van der Waals, electrostatic, and desolvation forces) and the similarity of a conformation to its native structure, the precise nature of this relationship is not known. Existing protein-protein docking methods typically formulate this relationship as a weighted sum of selected terms and calibrate their weights by using a training set to evaluate and rank candidate complexes. Despite improvements in the predictive power of recent docking methods, producing a large number of false positives by even state-of-the-art methods often leads to failure in predicting the correct binding of many complexes. With the aid of machine learning methods, we tested several approaches that not only rank candidate structures relative to each other but also predict how similar each candidate is to the native conformation. We trained a two-layer neural network, a multilayer neural network, and a network of Restricted Boltzmann Machines against extensive data sets of unbound complexes generated by RosettaDock and PyDock. We validated these methods with a set of refinement candidate structures. We were able to predict the root mean squared deviations (RMSDs) of protein complexes with a very small, often less than 1.5 Å, error margin when trained with structures that have RMSD values of up to 7 Å. In our most recent experiments with the protein samples having RMSD values up to 27 Å, the average prediction error was still relatively small, attesting to the potential of our approach in predicting the correct binding of protein-protein complexes.