title: Can morphing methods predict intermediate structures?
abstract: Movement is crucial to the biological function of many proteins, yet crystallographic structures of proteins can give us only a static snapshot. The protein dynamics that are important to biological function often happen on a timescale that is unattainable through detailed simulation methods such as molecular dynamics as they often involve crossing high-energy barriers. To address this coarse-grained motion, several methods have been implemented as web servers in which a set of coordinates is usually linearly interpolated from an initial crystallographic structure to a final crystallographic structure. We present a new morphing method that does not extrapolate linearly and can therefore go around high-energy barriers and which can produce different trajectories between the same two starting points. In this work, we evaluate our method and other established coarse-grained methods according to an objective measure: how close a coarse-grained dynamics method comes to a crystallographically determined intermediate structure when calculating a trajectory between the initial and final crystal protein structure. We test this with a set of five proteins with at least three crystallographically determined on-pathway high-resolution intermediate structures from the Protein Data Bank. For simple hinging motions involving a small conformational change, segmentation of the protein into two rigid sections outperforms other more computationally involved methods. However, large-scale conformational change is best addressed using a nonlinear approach and we suggest that there is merit in further developing such methods.
authors.affiliation: Department of Structural Biology, Stanford Medical School, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. dweiss@stanford.edu
authors.forename: Dahlia R
authors.initials: DR
authors.lastname: Weiss
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Levitt
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D018360:Crystallography, X-Ray; D008958:Models, Molecular; D009038:Motion; D017434:Protein Structure, Tertiary; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000378:metabolism*
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins