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On the accuracy of homology modeling and sequence alignment methods applied to membrane proteins.

ABSTRACT: In this study, we investigate the extent to which techniques for homology modeling that were developed for water-soluble proteins are appropriate for membrane proteins as well. To this end we present an assessment of current strategies for homology modeling of membrane proteins and introduce a benchmark data set of homologous membrane protein structures, called HOMEP. First, we use HOMEP to reveal the relationship between sequence identity and structural similarity in membrane proteins. This analysis indicates that homology modeling is at least as applicable to membrane proteins as it is to water-soluble proteins and that acceptable models (with C alpha-RMSD values to the native of 2 A or less in the transmembrane regions) may be obtained for template sequence identities of 30% or higher if an accurate alignment of the sequences is used. Second, we show that secondary-structure prediction algorithms that were developed for water-soluble proteins perform approximately as well for membrane proteins. Third, we provide a comparison of a set of commonly used sequence alignment algorithms as applied to membrane proteins. We find that high-accuracy alignments of membrane protein sequences can be obtained using state-of-the-art profile-to-profile methods that were developed for water-soluble proteins. Improvements are observed when weights derived from the secondary structure of the query and the template are used in the scoring of the alignment, a result which relies on the accuracy of the secondary-structure prediction of the query sequence. The most accurate alignments were obtained using template profiles constructed with the aid of structural alignments. In contrast, a simple sequence-to-sequence alignment algorithm, using a membrane protein-specific substitution matrix, shows no improvement in alignment accuracy. We suggest that profile-to-profile alignment methods should be adopted to maximize the accuracy of homology models of membrane proteins.

SUBMITTER: Forrest LR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1483079 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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On the accuracy of homology modeling and sequence alignment methods applied to membrane proteins.

Forrest Lucy R LR Tang Christopher L CL Honig Barry B

Biophysical journal 20060428 2

In this study, we investigate the extent to which techniques for homology modeling that were developed for water-soluble proteins are appropriate for membrane proteins as well. To this end we present an assessment of current strategies for homology modeling of membrane proteins and introduce a benchmark data set of homologous membrane protein structures, called HOMEP. First, we use HOMEP to reveal the relationship between sequence identity and structural similarity in membrane proteins. This ana ...[more]

PMID: 16648166

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Project description:BackgroundAccurate sequence alignments are essential for homology searches and for building three-dimensional structural models of proteins. Since structure is better conserved than sequence, structure alignments have been used to guide sequence alignments and are commonly used as the gold standard for sequence alignment evaluation. Nonetheless, as far as we know, there is no report of a systematic evaluation of pairwise structure alignment programs in terms of the sequence alignment accuracy.ResultsIn this study, we evaluate CE, DaliLite, FAST, LOCK2, MATRAS, SHEBA and VAST in terms of the accuracy of the sequence alignments they produce, using sequence alignments from NCBI's human-curated Conserved Domain Database (CDD) as the standard of truth. We find that 4 to 9% of the residues on average are either not aligned or aligned with more than 8 residues of shift error and that an additional 6 to 14% of residues on average are misaligned by 1-8 residues, depending on the program and the data set used. The fraction of correctly aligned residues generally decreases as the sequence similarity decreases or as the RMSD between the C alpha positions of the two structures increases. It varies significantly across CDD superfamilies whether shift error is allowed or not. Also, alignments with different shift errors occur between proteins within the same CDD superfamily, leading to inconsistent alignments between superfamily members. In general, residue pairs that are more than 3.0 A apart in the reference alignment are heavily (>or= 25% on average) misaligned in the test alignments. In addition, each method shows a different pattern of relative weaknesses for different SCOP classes. CE gives relatively poor results for beta-sheet-containing structures (all-beta, alpha/beta, and alpha+beta classes), DaliLite for "others" class where all but the major four classes are combined, and LOCK2 and VAST for all-beta and "others" classes.ConclusionWhen the sequence similarity is low, structure-based methods produce better sequence alignments than by using sequence similarities alone. However, current structure-based methods still mis-align 11-19% of the conserved core residues when compared to the human-curated CDD alignments. The alignment quality of each program depends on the protein structural type and similarity, with DaliLite showing the most agreement with CDD on average.

Dataset Information

On the accuracy of homology modeling and sequence alignment methods applied to membrane proteins.

Publications

On the accuracy of homology modeling and sequence alignment methods applied to membrane proteins.

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