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The amino acid alphabet and the architecture of the protein sequence-structure map. I. Binary alphabets.

ABSTRACT: The correspondence between protein sequences and structures, or sequence-structure map, relates to fundamental aspects of structural, evolutionary and synthetic biology. The specifics of the mapping, such as the fraction of accessible sequences and structures, or the sequences' ability to fold fast, are dictated by the type of interactions between the monomers that compose the sequences. The set of possible interactions between monomers is encapsulated by the potential energy function. In this study, I explore the impact of the relative forces of the potential on the architecture of the sequence-structure map. My observations rely on simple exact models of proteins and random samples of the space of potential energy functions of binary alphabets. I adopt a graph perspective and study the distribution of viable sequences and the structures they produce, as networks of sequences connected by point mutations. I observe that the relative proportion of attractive, neutral and repulsive forces defines types of potentials, that induce sequence-structure maps of vastly different architectures. I characterize the properties underlying these differences and relate them to the structure of the potential. Among these properties are the expected number and relative distribution of sequences associated to specific structures and the diversity of structures as a function of sequence divergence. I study the types of binary potentials observed in natural amino acids and show that there is a strong bias towards only some types of potentials, a bias that seems to characterize the folding code of natural proteins. I discuss implications of these observations for the architecture of the sequence-structure map of natural proteins, the construction of random libraries of peptides, and the early evolution of the natural amino acid alphabet.

SUBMITTER: Ferrada E

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4256021 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The amino acid alphabet and the architecture of the protein sequence-structure map. I. Binary alphabets.

Ferrada Evandro E

PLoS computational biology 20141204 12

The correspondence between protein sequences and structures, or sequence-structure map, relates to fundamental aspects of structural, evolutionary and synthetic biology. The specifics of the mapping, such as the fraction of accessible sequences and structures, or the sequences' ability to fold fast, are dictated by the type of interactions between the monomers that compose the sequences. The set of possible interactions between monomers is encapsulated by the potential energy function. In this s ...[more]

PMID: 25473967

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Project description:BACKGROUND: In structural genomics, an important goal is the detection and classification of protein-protein interactions, given the structures of the interacting partners. We have developed empirical energy functions to identify native structures of protein-protein complexes among sets of decoy structures. To understand the role of amino acid diversity, we parameterized a series of functions, using a hierarchy of amino acid alphabets of increasing complexity, with 2, 3, 4, 6, and 20 amino acid groups. Compared to previous work, we used the simplest possible functional form, with residue-residue interactions and a stepwise distance-dependence. We used increased computational resources, however, constructing 290,000 decoys for 219 protein-protein complexes, with a realistic docking protocol where the protein partners are flexible and interact through a molecular mechanics energy function. The energy parameters were optimized to correctly assign as many native complexes as possible. To resolve the multiple minimum problem in parameter space, over 64000 starting parameter guesses were tried for each energy function. The optimized functions were tested by cross validation on subsets of our native and decoy structures, by blind tests on series of native and decoy structures available on the Web, and on models for 13 complexes submitted to the CAPRI structure prediction experiment. RESULTS: Performance is similar to several other statistical potentials of the same complexity. For example, the CAPRI target structure is correctly ranked ahead of 90% of its decoys in 6 cases out of 13. The hierarchy of amino acid alphabets leads to a coherent hierarchy of energy functions, with qualitatively similar parameters for similar amino acid types at all levels. Most remarkably, the performance with six amino acid classes is equivalent to that of the most detailed, 20-class energy function. CONCLUSION: This suggests that six carefully chosen amino acid classes are sufficient to encode specificity in protein-protein interactions, and provide a starting point to develop more complicated energy functions.

Dataset Information

The amino acid alphabet and the architecture of the protein sequence-structure map. I. Binary alphabets.

Publications

The amino acid alphabet and the architecture of the protein sequence-structure map. I. Binary alphabets.

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