title: OPUS-PSP: an orientation-dependent statistical all-atom potential derived from side-chain packing.
abstract: Here we report an orientation-dependent statistical all-atom potential derived from side-chain packing, named OPUS-PSP. It features a basis set of 19 rigid-body blocks extracted from the chemical structures of all 20 amino acid residues. The potential is generated from the orientation-specific packing statistics of pairs of those blocks in a non-redundant structural database. The purpose of such an approach is to capture the essential elements of orientation dependence in molecular packing interactions. Tests of OPUS-PSP on commonly used decoy sets demonstrate that it significantly outperforms most of the existing knowledge-based potentials in terms of both its ability to recognize native structures and consistency in achieving high Z-scores across decoy sets. As OPUS-PSP excludes interactions among main-chain atoms, its success highlights the crucial importance of side-chain packing in forming native protein structures. Moreover, OPUS-PSP does not explicitly include solvation terms, and thus the potential should perform well when the solvation effect is difficult to determine, such as in membrane proteins. Overall, OPUS-PSP is a generally applicable potential for protein structure modeling, especially for handling side-chain conformations, one of the most difficult steps in high-accuracy protein structure prediction and refinement.
authors.affiliation: Verna and Marrs McLean Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Baylor College of Medicine, One Baylor Plaza, Houston, TX77030, USA.
authors.forename: Mingyang
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.forename: Athanasios D
authors.initials: AD
authors.lastname: Dousis
authors.forename: Jianpeng
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Ma
mesh_terms: D002621:Chemistry / Q000379:methods*; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D008956:Models, Chemical; D017434:Protein Structure, Tertiary; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry*
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins