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1.
Nurit Haspel Mark Moll Matthew L Baker Wah Chiu Lydia E Kavraki 《BMC structural biology》2010,10(Z1):S1
Background
Many proteins undergo extensive conformational changes as part of their functionality. Tracing these changes is important for understanding the way these proteins function. Traditional biophysics-based conformational search methods require a large number of calculations and are hard to apply to large-scale conformational motions.Results
In this work we investigate the application of a robotics-inspired method, using backbone and limited side chain representation and a coarse grained energy function to trace large-scale conformational motions. We tested the algorithm on four well known medium to large proteins and we show that even with relatively little information we are able to trace low-energy conformational pathways efficiently. The conformational pathways produced by our methods can be further filtered and refined to produce more useful information on the way proteins function under physiological conditions.Conclusions
The proposed method effectively captures large-scale conformational changes and produces pathways that are consistent with experimental data and other computational studies. The method represents an important first step towards a larger scale modeling of more complex biological systems.2.
Mateusz Kurcinski Maciej Blaszczyk Maciej Pawel Ciemny Andrzej Kolinski Sebastian Kmiecik 《Biomedical engineering online》2017,16(1):73
Background
The characterization of protein–peptide interactions is a challenge for computational molecular docking. Protein–peptide docking tools face at least two major difficulties: (1) efficient sampling of large-scale conformational changes induced by binding and (2) selection of the best models from a large set of predicted structures. In this paper, we merge an efficient sampling technique with external information about side-chain contacts to sample and select the best possible models.Methods
In this paper we test a new protocol that uses information about side-chain contacts in CABS-dock protein–peptide docking. As shown in our recent studies, CABS-dock enables efficient modeling of large-scale conformational changes without knowledge about the binding site. However, the resulting set of binding sites and poses is in many cases highly diverse and difficult to score.Results
As we demonstrate here, information about a single side-chain contact can significantly improve the prediction accuracy. Importantly, the imposed constraints for side-chain contacts are quite soft. Therefore, the developed protocol does not require precise contact information and ensures large-scale peptide flexibility in the broad contact area.Conclusions
The demonstrated protocol provides the extension of the CABS-dock method that can be practically used in the structure prediction of protein–peptide complexes guided by the knowledge of the binding interface.3.
Background
The protein encoded by the gene ybgI was chosen as a target for a structural genomics project emphasizing the relation of protein structure to function.Results
The structure of the ybgI protein is a toroid composed of six polypeptide chains forming a trimer of dimers. Each polypeptide chain binds two metal ions on the inside of the toroid.Conclusion
The toroidal structure is comparable to that of some proteins that are involved in DNA metabolism. The di-nuclear metal site could imply that the specific function of this protein is as a hydrolase-oxidase enzyme.4.
Luis Sanchez-Pulido Laurent Perez Steffen Kuhn Isabelle Vernos Miguel A. Andrade-Navarro 《BMC structural biology》2016,16(1):17
Background
TPX2 (Targeting Protein for Xklp2) is essential for spindle assembly, activation of the mitotic kinase Aurora A and for triggering microtubule nucleation. Homologs of TPX2 in Chordata and plants were previously identified. Currently, proteins of the TPX2 family have little structural information and only small parts are covered by defined protein domains.Methods
We have used computational sequence analyses and structural predictions of proteins of the TPX2 family, supported with Circular Dichroism (CD) measurements.Results
Here, we report our finding that the C-terminal domain of TPX2, which is responsible of its microtubule nucleation capacity and is conserved in all members of the family, is actually formed by tandem repeats, covering well above 2/3 of the protein. We propose that this region forms a flexible solenoid involved in protein-protein interactions. Structural prediction and molecular modeling, combined with Circular Dichroism (CD) measurements reveal a predominant alpha-helical content. Furthermore, we identify full length homologs in fungi and shorter homologs with a different domain organization in diptera (including a paralogous expansion in Drosophila).Conclusions
Our results, represent the first computational and biophysical analysis of the TPX2 proteins family and help understand the structure and evolution of this conserved protein family to direct future structural studies.5.
Background
Essential proteins are indispensable to the survival and development process of living organisms. To understand the functional mechanisms of essential proteins, which can be applied to the analysis of disease and design of drugs, it is important to identify essential proteins from a set of proteins first. As traditional experimental methods designed to test out essential proteins are usually expensive and laborious, computational methods, which utilize biological and topological features of proteins, have attracted more attention in recent years. Protein-protein interaction networks, together with other biological data, have been explored to improve the performance of essential protein prediction.Results
The proposed method SCP is evaluated on Saccharomyces cerevisiae datasets and compared with five other methods. The results show that our method SCP outperforms the other five methods in terms of accuracy of essential protein prediction.Conclusions
In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm named SCP, which combines the ranking by a modified PageRank algorithm based on subcellular compartments information, with the ranking by Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) calculated from gene expression data. Experiments show that subcellular localization information is promising in boosting essential protein prediction.6.
Introduction
Untargeted metabolomics is a powerful tool for biological discoveries. To analyze the complex raw data, significant advances in computational approaches have been made, yet it is not clear how exhaustive and reliable the data analysis results are.Objectives
Assessment of the quality of raw data processing in untargeted metabolomics.Methods
Five published untargeted metabolomics studies, were reanalyzed.Results
Omissions of at least 50 relevant compounds from the original results as well as examples of representative mistakes were reported for each study.Conclusion
Incomplete raw data processing shows unexplored potential of current and legacy data.7.
Background
Identification of phosphorylation sites by computational methods is becoming increasingly important because it reduces labor-intensive and costly experiments and can improve our understanding of the common properties and underlying mechanisms of protein phosphorylation.Methods
A multitask learning framework for learning four kinase families simultaneously, instead of studying each kinase family of phosphorylation sites separately, is presented in the study. The framework includes two multitask classification methods: the Multi-Task Least Squares Support Vector Machines (MTLS-SVMs) and the Multi-Task Feature Selection (MT-Feat3).Results
Using the multitask learning framework, we successfully identify 18 common features shared by four kinase families of phosphorylation sites. The reliability of selected features is demonstrated by the consistent performance in two multi-task learning methods.Conclusions
The selected features can be used to build efficient multitask classifiers with good performance, suggesting they are important to protein phosphorylation across 4 kinase families.8.
Background
Protein-protein interactions are important for several cellular processes. Understanding the mechanism of protein-protein recognition and predicting the binding sites in protein-protein complexes are long standing goals in molecular and computational biology.Methods
We have developed an energy based approach for identifying the binding site residues in protein–protein complexes. The binding site residues have been analyzed with sequence and structure based parameters such as binding propensity, neighboring residues in the vicinity of binding sites, conservation score and conformational switching.Results
We observed that the binding propensities of amino acid residues are specific for protein-protein complexes. Further, typical dipeptides and tripeptides showed high preference for binding, which is unique to protein-protein complexes. Most of the binding site residues are highly conserved among homologous sequences. Our analysis showed that 7% of residues changed their conformations upon protein-protein complex formation and it is 9.2% and 6.6% in the binding and non-binding sites, respectively. Specifically, the residues Glu, Lys, Leu and Ser changed their conformation from coil to helix/strand and from helix to coil/strand. Leu, Ser, Thr and Val prefer to change their conformation from strand to coil/helix.Conclusions
The results obtained in this study will be helpful for understanding and predicting the binding sites in protein-protein complexes.9.
From mutations to mechanisms and dysfunction via computation and mining of protein energy landscapes
Qiao Wanli Akhter Nasrin Fang Xiaowen Maximova Tatiana Plaku Erion Shehu Amarda 《BMC genomics》2018,19(7):671-13
Background
The protein energy landscape underscores the inherent nature of proteins as dynamic molecules interconverting between structures with varying energies. Reconstructing a protein’s energy landscape holds the key to characterizing a protein’s equilibrium conformational dynamics and its relationship to function. Many pathogenic mutations in protein sequences alter the equilibrium dynamics that regulates molecular interactions and thus protein function. In principle, reconstructing energy landscapes of a protein’s healthy and diseased variants is a central step to understanding how mutations impact dynamics, biological mechanisms, and function.Results
Recent computational advances are yielding detailed, sample-based representations of protein energy landscapes. In this paper, we propose and describe two novel methods that leverage computed, sample-based representations of landscapes to reconstruct them and extract from them informative local structures that reveal the underlying organization of an energy landscape. Such structures constitute landscape features that, as we demonstrate here, can be utilized to detect alterations of landscapes upon mutation.Conclusions
The proposed methods detect altered protein energy landscape features in response to sequence mutations. By doing so, the methods allow formulating hypotheses on the impact of mutations on specific biological activities of a protein. This work demonstrates that the availability of energy landscapes of healthy and diseased variants of a protein opens up new avenues to harness the quantitative information embedded in landscapes to summarize mechanisms via which mutations alter protein dynamics to percolate to dysfunction.10.
Objectives
The effect of different formulations variables on protein integrity were investigated using lysozyme as a model protein for the development of biotherapeutic protein formulations for use in the clinic.Results
Buffer composition/concentration was the key variable of formulation reagents investigated in determining lysozyme stability and authenticity independent of protein concentration whilst the storage temperature and time, not surprisingly, were also key variables. Tryptic peptide mapping of the protein showed that the modifications occurred when formulated under specific conditions but not others. A model peptide system was developed that reflected the same behavior under formulation conditions as intact lysozyme.Conclusions
Peptide models may mirror the stability of proteins, or regions of proteins, in the same formulations and be used to help develop a rapid screen of formulations for stabilisation of biotherapeutic proteins.11.
Fan Zhang Haoting Chen Li Na Zhao Hui Liu Teresa M. Przytycka Jie Zheng 《BMC systems biology》2016,10(Z1):S7
Background
Cellular responses to extracellular perturbations require signaling pathways to capture and transmit the signals. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms of signal transduction are not yet fully understood, thus detailed and comprehensive models may not be available for all the signaling pathways. In particular, insufficient knowledge of parameters, which is a long-standing hindrance for quantitative kinetic modeling necessitates the use of parameter-free methods for modeling and simulation to capture dynamic properties of signaling pathways.Results
We present a computational model that is able to simulate the graded responses to degradations, the sigmoidal biological relationships between signaling molecules and the effects of scheduled perturbations to the cells. The simulation results are validated using experimental data of protein phosphorylation, demonstrating that the proposed model is capable of capturing the main trend of protein activities during the process of signal transduction. Compared with existing simulators, our model has better performance on predicting the state transitions of signaling networks.Conclusion
The proposed simulation tool provides a valuable resource for modeling cellular signaling pathways using a knowledge-based method.12.
Expression and purification of classical swine fever virus E2 protein from Sf9 cells using a modified vector 总被引:1,自引:0,他引:1
Objective
To develop a simple method for efficient expression of classical swine fever virus (CSFV) E2 protein.Results
The pFastBac HT B vector (pFastHTB-M1) was modified by adding a melittin signal peptide sequence. The E2 gene fragment without the transmembrane region was cloned into pFastHTB-M1. The modified vector has clear advantage over the original one, as evidenced by the purified recombinant E2 protein that was detected significantly by SDS-PAGE.Conclusions
The modified vector has the potential for large-scale production and easy purification of the CSFV E2 protein or other proteins of interests.13.
Background
Many proteins tune their biological function by transitioning between different functional states, effectively acting as dynamic molecular machines. Detailed structural characterization of transition trajectories is central to understanding the relationship between protein dynamics and function. Computational approaches that build on the Molecular Dynamics framework are in principle able to model transition trajectories at great detail but also at considerable computational cost. Methods that delay consideration of dynamics and focus instead on elucidating energetically-credible conformational paths connecting two functionally-relevant structures provide a complementary approach. Effective sampling-based path planning methods originating in robotics have been recently proposed to produce conformational paths. These methods largely model short peptides or address large proteins by simplifying conformational space.Methods
We propose a robotics-inspired method that connects two given structures of a protein by sampling conformational paths. The method focuses on small- to medium-size proteins, efficiently modeling structural deformations through the use of the molecular fragment replacement technique. In particular, the method grows a tree in conformational space rooted at the start structure, steering the tree to a goal region defined around the goal structure. We investigate various bias schemes over a progress coordinate for balance between coverage of conformational space and progress towards the goal. A geometric projection layer promotes path diversity. A reactive temperature scheme allows sampling of rare paths that cross energy barriers.Results and conclusions
Experiments are conducted on small- to medium-size proteins of length up to 214 amino acids and with multiple known functionally-relevant states, some of which are more than 13Å apart of each-other. Analysis reveals that the method effectively obtains conformational paths connecting structural states that are significantly different. A detailed analysis on the depth and breadth of the tree suggests that a soft global bias over the progress coordinate enhances sampling and results in higher path diversity. The explicit geometric projection layer that biases the exploration away from over-sampled regions further increases coverage, often improving proximity to the goal by forcing the exploration to find new paths. The reactive temperature scheme is shown effective in increasing path diversity, particularly in difficult structural transitions with known high-energy barriers.14.
Background
Studies of intrinsically disordered proteins that lack a stable tertiary structure but still have important biological functions critically rely on computational methods that predict this property based on sequence information. Although a number of fairly successful models for prediction of protein disorder have been developed over the last decade, the quality of their predictions is limited by available cases of confirmed disorders.Results
To more reliably estimate protein disorder from protein sequences, an iterative algorithm is proposed that integrates predictions of multiple disorder models without relying on any protein sequences with confirmed disorder annotation. The iterative method alternately provides the maximum a posterior (MAP) estimation of disorder prediction and the maximum-likelihood (ML) estimation of quality of multiple disorder predictors. Experiments on data used at CASP7, CASP8, and CASP9 have shown the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.Conclusions
The proposed algorithm can potentially be used to predict protein disorder and provide helpful suggestions on choosing suitable disorder predictors for unknown protein sequences.15.
Yingfeng Wang Xutao Wang Xiaoqin Zeng 《Metabolomics : Official journal of the Metabolomic Society》2017,13(10):116
Introduction
Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) has been widely used for identifying metabolites in many areas. However, computationally identifying metabolites from MS/MS data is challenging due to the unknown of fragmentation rules, which determine the precedence of chemical bond dissociation. Although this problem has been tackled by different ways, the lack of computational tools to flexibly represent adjacent structures of chemical bonds is still a long-term bottleneck for studying fragmentation rules.Objectives
This study aimed to develop computational methods for investigating fragmentation rules by analyzing annotated MS/MS data.Methods
We implemented a computational platform, MIDAS-G, for investigating fragmentation rules. MIDAS-G processes a metabolite as a simple graph and uses graph grammars to recognize specific chemical bonds and their adjacent structures. We can apply MIDAS-G to investigate fragmentation rules by adjusting bond weights in the scoring model of the metabolite identification tool and comparing metabolite identification performances.Results
We used MIDAS-G to investigate four bond types on real annotated MS/MS data in experiments. The experimental results matched data collected from wet labs and literature. The effectiveness of MIDAS-G was confirmed.Conclusion
We developed a computational platform for investigating fragmentation rules of tandem mass spectrometry. This platform is freely available for download.16.
Background
Despite computational challenges, elucidating conformations that a protein system assumes under physiologic conditions for the purpose of biological activity is a central problem in computational structural biology. While these conformations are associated with low energies in the energy surface that underlies the protein conformational space, few existing conformational search algorithms focus on explicitly sampling low-energy local minima in the protein energy surface.Methods
This work proposes a novel probabilistic search framework, PLOW, that explicitly samples low-energy local minima in the protein energy surface. The framework combines algorithmic ingredients from evolutionary computation and computational structural biology to effectively explore the subspace of local minima. A greedy local search maps a conformation sampled in conformational space to a nearby local minimum. A perturbation move jumps out of a local minimum to obtain a new starting conformation for the greedy local search. The process repeats in an iterative fashion, resulting in a trajectory-based exploration of the subspace of local minima.Results and conclusions
The analysis of PLOW's performance shows that, by navigating only the subspace of local minima, PLOW is able to sample conformations near a protein's native structure, either more effectively or as well as state-of-the-art methods that focus on reproducing the native structure for a protein system. Analysis of the actual subspace of local minima shows that PLOW samples this subspace more effectively that a naive sampling approach. Additional theoretical analysis reveals that the perturbation function employed by PLOW is key to its ability to sample a diverse set of low-energy conformations. This analysis also suggests directions for further research and novel applications for the proposed framework.17.
Background
One of the recent challenges of computational biology is development of new algorithms, tools and software to facilitate predictive modeling of big data generated by high-throughput technologies in biomedical research.Results
To meet these demands we developed PROPER - a package for visual evaluation of ranking classifiers for biological big data mining studies in the MATLAB environment.Conclusion
PROPER is an efficient tool for optimization and comparison of ranking classifiers, providing over 20 different two- and three-dimensional performance curves.18.
N. Cesbron A.-L. Royer Y. Guitton A. Sydor B. Le Bizec G. Dervilly-Pinel 《Metabolomics : Official journal of the Metabolomic Society》2017,13(8):99
Introduction
Collecting feces is easy. It offers direct outcome to endogenous and microbial metabolites.Objectives
In a context of lack of consensus about fecal sample preparation, especially in animal species, we developed a robust protocol allowing untargeted LC-HRMS fingerprinting.Methods
The conditions of extraction (quantity, preparation, solvents, dilutions) were investigated in bovine feces.Results
A rapid and simple protocol involving feces extraction with methanol (1/3, M/V) followed by centrifugation and a step filtration (10 kDa) was developed.Conclusion
The workflow generated repeatable and informative fingerprints for robust metabolome characterization.19.
Background
Proteins play fundamental and crucial roles in nearly all biological processes, such as, enzymatic catalysis, signaling transduction, DNA and RNA synthesis, and embryonic development. It has been a long-standing goal in molecular biology to predict the tertiary structure of a protein from its primary amino acid sequence. From visual comparison, it was found that a 2D triangular lattice model can give a better structure modeling and prediction for proteins with short primary amino acid sequences.Methods
This paper proposes a hybrid of hill-climbing and genetic algorithm (HHGA) based on elite-based reproduction strategy for protein structure prediction on the 2D triangular lattice.Results
The simulation results show that the proposed HHGA can successfully deal with the protein structure prediction problems. Specifically, HHGA significantly outperforms conventional genetic algorithms and is comparable to the state-of-the-art method in terms of free energy.Conclusions
Thanks to the enhancement of local search on the global search, the proposed HHGA achieves promising results on the 2D triangular protein structure prediction problem. The satisfactory simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed HHGA and the utility of the 2D triangular lattice model for protein structure prediction.20.