INTERHELICAL CONTACTS DETERMINING THE ARCHITECTURE OF ALPHA-HELICAL GLOBULAR-PROTEINS

An approach based on a presentation of alpha-helical protein topology as a graph is presented. The approach allows to estimate a role of eac h interhelical contact in the whole protein topology and to classify t he contacts. It is shown that a consideration of only about a half of the whole pool of interhelical contacts exposed in the protein is enou gh for a determination of protein architecture. Such contacts are call ed as major and their quantitative characteristics are obtained. Moreo ver, providing a clear and simple presentation of the protein topology , the approach can be applied for a description of structural domain/s ubdomain arrangement of alpha-helical proteins and illustration of the ir folding/denaturation paths.