Are Protein Conformational Ensembles in Agreement with Experimental Data? A Geometrical Interpretation of the Problem.

J Chem Inf Model

Department of Chemistry "Ugo Schiff" and Magnetic Resonance Center (CERM), University of Florence, Via Luigi Sacconi 6, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Florence, Italy.

Published: July 2024

AI Article Synopsis

  • Conformational variability of biological macromolecules is crucial for their functions and predicting their behavior in organism-wide studies.
  • Various experimental and computational methods are used to understand this variability, leading to the creation of conformational ensembles with differing properties based on the reconstruction methods applied.
  • The article proposes a geometrical framework to assess how well these predicted ensembles match with experimental data.

Article Abstract

The conformational variability of biological macromolecules can play an important role in their biological function. Therefore, understanding conformational variability is expected to be key for predicting the behavior of a particular molecule in the context of organism-wide studies. Several experimental methods have been developed and deployed for accessing this information, and computational methods are continuously updated for the profitable integration of different experimental sources. The outcome of this endeavor is conformational ensembles, which may vary significantly in properties and composition when different ensemble reconstruction methods are used, and this raises the issue of comparing the predicted ensembles against experimental data. In this article, we discuss a geometrical formulation to provide a framework for understanding the agreement of an ensemble prediction to the experimental observations.

Download full-text PDF

Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.4c00582DOI Listing

Publication Analysis

Top Keywords

conformational ensembles
8
conformational variability
8
experimental
5
protein conformational
4
ensembles agreement
4
agreement experimental
4
experimental data?
4
data? geometrical
4
geometrical interpretation
4
interpretation problem
4

Similar Publications

Capillary vibrating sharp-edge spray ionization (cVSSI) has been used to control the droplet charging of nebulized microdroplets and monitor effects on protein ion conformation makeup as determined by mass spectrometry (MS). Here it is observed that the application of voltage results in noticeable differences to the charge state distributions (CSDs) of ubiquitin ions. The data can be described most generally in three distinct voltage regions: Under low-voltage conditions (<+200 V, LV regime), low charge states (2+ to 4+ ions) dominate the mass spectra.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The ensemble properties of a system are obtained by averaging over the properties calculated for the various configurations it can have at a finite temperature and thus cannot be captured by a single molecular structure. Such ensemble properties are often important in material discovery. In designing new materials, the goal is to predict those ensemble structures that display a tailored property.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

SFCalculator: connecting deep generative models and crystallography.

bioRxiv

January 2025

John A. Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, Harvard University.

Proteins drive biochemical transformations by transitioning through distinct conformational states. Understanding these states is essential for modulating protein function. Although X-ray crystallography has enabled revolutionary advances in protein structure prediction by machine learning, this connection was made at the level of atomic models, not the underlying data.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

P21-activated kinase 4 (PAK4) plays a crucial role in the proliferation and metastasis of various cancers. However, developing selective PAK4 inhibitors remains challenging due to the high homology within the PAK family. Therefore, developing highly selective PAK4 inhibitors is critical to overcoming the limitations of existing inhibitors.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Implementation of Time-Averaged Restraints with UNRES Coarse-Grained Model of Polypeptide Chains.

J Chem Theory Comput

January 2025

Faculty of Chemistry, University of Gdańsk, Fahrenheit Union of Universities, ul. Wita Stwosza 63, 80-308 Gdańsk, Poland.

Time-averaged restraints from nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements have been implemented in the UNRES coarse-grained model of polypeptide chains in order to develop a tool for data-assisted modeling of the conformational ensembles of multistate proteins, intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) and proteins with intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs), many of which are essential in cell biology. A numerically stable variant of molecular dynamics with time-averaged restraints has been introduced, in which the total energy is conserved in sections of a trajectory in microcanonical runs, the bath temperature is maintained in canonical runs, and the time-average-restraint-force components are scaled up with the length of the memory window so that the restraints affect the simulated structures. The new approach restores the conformational ensembles used to generate ensemble-averaged distances, as demonstrated with synthetic restraints.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Want AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?

Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!