Grow to Fit Molecular Dynamics (G2FMD): an ab initio method for protein side-chain assignment and refinement

Computational reconstruction of atomistic protein structures from coarse-grained models

Three-dimensional protein structures, whether determined experimentally or theoretically, are often too low resolution. In this mini-review, we outline the computational methods for protein structure reconstruction from incomplete coarse-grained to all atomistic models. Typical reconstruction schemes can be divided into four major steps. Usually, the first step is reconstruction of the protein backbone chain starting from the C-alpha trace. This is followed by side-chains rebuilding based on protein backbone geometry. Subsequently, hydrogen atoms can be reconstructed. Finally, the resulting all-atom models may require structure optimization. Many methods are available to perform each of these tasks. We discuss the available tools and their potential applications in integrative modeling pipelines that can transfer coarse-grained information from computational predictions, or experiment, to all atomistic structures.

OPUS-Rota2: An Improved Fast and Accurate Side-Chain Modeling Method

Side-chain modeling plays a critical role in protein structure prediction. However, in many current methods, balancing the speed and accuracy is still challenging. In this paper, on the basis of our previous work OPUS-Rota (Protein Sci. 2008, 17, 1576-1585), we introduce a new side-chain modeling method, OPUS-Rota2, which is tested on both a 65-protein test set (DB65) in the OPUS-Rota paper and a 379-protein test set (DB379) in the SCWRL4 paper. If the main chain is native, OPUS-Rota2 is more accurate than OPUS-Rota, SCWRL4, and OSCAR-star but slightly less accurate than OSCAR-o. Also, if the main chain is non-native, OPUS-Rota2 is more accurate than any other method. Moreover, OPUS-Rota2 is significantly faster than any other method, in particular, 2 orders of magnitude faster than OSCAR-o. Thus, the combination of higher accuracy and speed of OPUS-Rota2 in modeling side chains on both the native and non-native main chains makes OPUS-Rota2 a very useful tool in protein structure modeling.

Protein side-chain packing problem: is there still room for improvement?

The protein side-chain packing problem (PSCPP) is an important subproblem of both protein structure prediction and protein design. During the past two decades, a large number of methods have been proposed to tackle this problem. These methods consist of three main components: a rotamer library, a scoring function and a search strategy. The average overall accuracy level obtained by these methods is approximately 87%. Whether a better accuracy level could be achieved remains to be answered. To address this question, we calculated the maximum accuracy level attainable using a simple rotamer library, independently of the energy function or the search method. Using 2883 different structures from the Protein Data Bank, we compared this accuracy level with the accuracy level of five state-of-the-art methods. These comparisons indicated that, for buried residues in the protein, we are already close to the best possible accuracy results. In addition, for exposed residues, we found that a significant gap exists between the possible improvement and the maximum accuracy level achievable with current methods. After determining that an improvement is possible, the next step is to understand what limitations are preventing us from obtaining such an improvement. Previous works on protein structure prediction and protein design have shown that scoring function inaccuracies may represent the main obstacle to achieving better results for these problems. To show that the same is true for the PSCPP, we evaluated the quality of two scoring functions used by some state-of-the-art algorithms. Our results indicate that neither of these scoring functions can guide the search method correctly, thereby reinforcing the idea that efforts to solve the PSCPP must also focus on developing better scoring functions.

Improved side-chain modeling by coupling clash-detection guided iterative search with rotamer relaxation

MOTIVATION

Side-chain modeling has seen wide applications in computational structure biology. Most of the popular side-chain modeling programs explore the conformation space using discrete rigid rotamers for speed and efficiency. However, in the tightly packed environments of protein interiors, these methods will inherently lead to atomic clashes and hinder the prediction accuracy.

RESULTS

We present a side-chain modeling method (CIS-RR), which couples a novel clash-detection guided iterative search (CIS) algorithm with continuous torsion space optimization of rotamers (RR). Benchmark testing shows that compared with the existing popular side-chain modeling methods, CIS-RR removes atomic clashes much more effectively and achieves comparable or even better prediction accuracy while having comparable computational cost. We believe that CIS-RR could be a useful method for accurate side-chain modeling.

AVAILABILITY

CIS-RR is available to non-commercial users at our website: http://jianglab.ibp.ac.cn/lims/cisrr/cisrr.html.

Trends in template/fragment-free protein structure prediction

Predicting the structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence is a long-standing unsolved problem in computational biology. Its solution would be of both fundamental and practical importance as the gap between the number of known sequences and the number of experimentally solved structures widens rapidly. Currently, the most successful approaches are based on fragment/template reassembly. Lacking progress in template-free structure prediction calls for novel ideas and approaches. This article reviews trends in the development of physical and specific knowledge-based energy functions as well as sampling techniques for fragment-free structure prediction. Recent physical- and knowledge-based studies demonstrated that it is possible to sample and predict highly accurate protein structures without borrowing native fragments from known protein structures. These emerging approaches with fully flexible sampling have the potential to move the field forward.

OPUS-Rota: a fast and accurate method for side-chain modeling

In this paper, we introduce a fast and accurate side-chain modeling method, named OPUS-Rota. In a benchmark comparison with the methods SCWRL, NCN, LGA, SPRUCE, Rosetta, and SCAP, OPUS-Rota is shown to be much faster than all the methods except SCWRL, which is comparably fast. In terms of overall chi (1) and chi (1+2) accuracies, however, OPUS-Rota is 5.4 and 8.8 percentage points better, respectively, than SCWRL. Compared with NCN, which has the best accuracy in the literature, OPUS-Rota is 1.6 percentage points better for overall chi (1+2) but 0.3 percentage points weaker for overall chi (1). Hence, our algorithm is much more accurate than SCWRL with similar execution speed, and it has accuracy comparable to or better than the most accurate methods in the literature, but with a runtime that is one or two orders of magnitude shorter. In addition, OPUS-Rota consistently outperforms SCWRL on the Wallner and Elofsson homology-modeling benchmark set when the sequence identity is greater than 40%. We hope that OPUS-Rota will contribute to high-accuracy structure refinement, and the computer program is freely available for academic users.

Conformational changes in protein function

Conformational changes are the hallmarks of protein dynamics and are often intimately related to protein functions. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation is a powerful tool to study the time-resolved properties of protein structure in atomic details. In this chapter, we discuss the various applications of MD simulation to the study of protein conformational changes, and introduce several selected advanced techniques that may significantly increase the sampling efficiencies, including locally enhanced sampling (LES), and grow-to-fit molecular dynamics (G2FMD).

Modeling mutations in protein structures

We describe an automated method for the modeling of point mutations in protein structures. The protein is represented by all non-hydrogen atoms. The scoring function consists of several types of physical potential energy terms and homology-derived restraints. The optimization method implements a combination of conjugate gradient minimization and molecular dynamics with simulated annealing. The testing set consists of 717 pairs of known protein structures differing by a single mutation. Twelve variations of the scoring function were tested in three different environments of the mutated residue. The best-performing protocol optimizes all the atoms of the mutated residue, with respect to a scoring function that includes molecular mechanics energy terms for bond distances, angles, dihedral angles, peptide bond planarity, and non-bonded atomic contacts represented by Lennard-Jones potential, dihedral angle restraints derived from the aligned homologous structure, and a statistical potential for non-bonded atomic interactions extracted from a large set of known protein structures. The current method compares favorably with other tested approaches, especially when predicting long and flexible side-chains. In addition to the thoroughness of the conformational search, sampled degrees of freedom, and the scoring function type, the accuracy of the method was also evaluated as a function of the flexibility of the mutated side-chain, the relative volume change of the mutated residue, and its residue type. The results suggest that further improvement is likely to be achieved by concentrating on the improvement of the scoring function, in addition to or instead of increasing the variety of sampled conformations.

Improved sampling methods for molecular simulation

Molecular simulation has broad application in the biological sciences. One of the greatest challenges in molecular simulation is the limited conformational sampling due to slow barrier crossing on the rugged energy landscape of complex biomolecules and to the relatively short simulation time. Many enhanced sampling techniques have been developed over the years to alleviate this problem. Significant progress has been made in the past couple of years, with emerging methods targeting specific aspects of the potential energy surface and new variants of the replica exchange method.