title: Computational protein design with side-chain conformational entropy.
abstract: Recent advances in modeling protein structures at the atomic level have made it possible to tackle "de novo" computational protein design. Most procedures are based on combinatorial optimization using a scoring function that estimates the folding free energy of a protein sequence on a given main-chain structure. However, the computation of the conformational entropy in the folded state is generally an intractable problem, and its contribution to the free energy is not properly evaluated. In this article, we propose a new automated protein design methodology that incorporates such conformational entropy based on statistical mechanics principles. We define the free energy of a protein sequence by the corresponding partition function over rotamer states. The free energy is written in variational form in a pairwise approximation and minimized using the Belief Propagation algorithm. In this way, a free energy is associated to each amino acid sequence: we use this insight to rescore the results obtained with a standard minimization method, with the energy as the cost function. Then, we set up a design method that directly uses the free energy as a cost function in combination with a stochastic search in the sequence space. We validate the methods on the design of three superficial sites of a small SH3 domain, and then apply them to the complete redesign of 27 proteins. Our results indicate that accounting for entropic contribution in the score function affects the outcome in a highly nontrivial way, and might improve current computational design techniques based on protein stability.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Física Teórica, Universidad de Zaragoza, c. Pedro Cerbuna 12, Zaragoza 50009, Spain.
authors.forename: Daniele
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Sciretti
authors.forename: Pierpaolo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Bruscolini
authors.forename: Alessandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pelizzola
authors.forename: Marco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Pretti
authors.forename: Alfonso
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Jaramillo
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D003198:Computer Simulation; D019277:Entropy; D008956:Models, Chemical; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D011487:Protein Conformation; D017510:Protein Folding; D055550:Protein Stability; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry*; D050737:Proto-Oncogene Proteins c-crk / Q000737:chemistry; D018909:src Homology Domains
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins; D050737:Proto-Oncogene Proteins c-crk