D. Kihara et al., TOUCHSTONE: An ab initio protein structure prediction method that uses threading-based tertiary restraints, P NAS US, 98(18), 2001, pp. 10125-10130
Citations number
26
Categorie Soggetti
Multidisciplinary
Journal title
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
The successful prediction of protein structure from amino acid sequence req
uires two features: an efficient conformational search algorithm and an ene
rgy function with a global minimum in the native state. As a step toward ad
dressing both issues, a threading-based method of secondary and tertiary re
straint prediction has been developed and applied to ab initio folding. Suc
h restraints are derived by extracting consensus contacts and. local second
ary structure from at least weakly scoring structures that, in some cases,
can lack any global similarity to the sequence of interest. Furthermore, to
generate representative protein structures, a reduced lattice-based protei
n model is used with replica exchange Monte Carlo to explore conformational
space. We report results on the application of this methodology, termed TO
UCHSTONE, to 65 proteins whose lengths range from 39 to 146 residues. For 4
7 (40) proteins, a cluster centroid whose rms deviation from native is belo
w 6.5 (5) Angstrom is found in one of the five lowest energy centroids. The
number of correctly predicted proteins increases to 50 when atomic detail
is added and a knowledge-based atomic potential is combined with clustered
and nonclustered structures for candidate selection. The combination of the
ratio of the relative number of contacts to the protein length and the num
ber of clusters generated by the folding algorithm is a reliable indicator
of the likelihood of successful fold prediction, thereby opening the way fo
r genome-scale ab initio folding.