ALGORITHM FOR RAPID RECONSTRUCTION OF PROTEIN BACKBONE FROM ALPHA-CARBON COORDINATES

A method for generating a full backbone protein structure from the coo rdinates of oc-carbons, is presented. The method extracts information from known protein structures to generate statistical positions for th e reconstructed atoms. Tests on a set of proteins structures show the algorithm to be of comparable accuracy to existing procedures. However , the basic advantage of the presented method is its simplicity and sp eed. in a test run, the present program is shown to be much faster tha n existing database searching algorithms, and reconstructs about 8000 residues per second. Thus, it may be included as an independent proced ure in protein folding algorithms to rapidly generate approximate coor dinates of backbone atoms. (C) 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.