Modularity of Protein Folds as a Tool for Template-Free Modeling of Structures

Brinda Vallat, Carlos Madrid-Aliste, Andras Fiser

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

16 Scopus citations

Abstract

Predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences remains a challenging problem in molecular biology. While the current structural coverage of proteins is almost exclusively provided by template-based techniques, the modeling of the rest of the protein sequences increasingly require template-free methods. However, template-free modeling methods are much less reliable and are usually applicable for smaller proteins, leaving much space for improvement. We present here a novel computational method that uses a library of supersecondary structure fragments, known as Smotifs, to model protein structures. The library of Smotifs has saturated over time, providing a theoretical foundation for efficient modeling. The method relies on weak sequence signals from remotely related protein structures to create a library of Smotif fragments specific to the target protein sequence. This Smotif library is exploited in a fragment assembly protocol to sample decoys, which are assessed by a composite scoring function. Since the Smotif fragments are larger in size compared to the ones used in other fragment-based methods, the proposed modeling algorithm, SmotifTF, can employ an exhaustive sampling during decoy assembly. SmotifTF successfully predicts the overall fold of the target proteins in about 50% of the test cases and performs competitively when compared to other state of the art prediction methods, especially when sequence signal to remote homologs is diminishing. Smotif-based modeling is complementary to current prediction methods and provides a promising direction in addressing the structure prediction problem, especially when targeting larger proteins for modeling.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article numbere1004419
JournalPLoS Computational Biology
Volume11
Issue number8
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 1 2015

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
  • Modeling and Simulation
  • Ecology
  • Molecular Biology
  • Genetics
  • Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics

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