Capturing native/native like structures with a physico-chemical metric (pcSM) in protein folding

Specification of the three dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence, also called a “Grand Challenge” problem, has eluded a solution for over six decades. A modestly successful strategy has evolved over the last couple of decades based on development of scoring functions (e.g. mimicking free energy) that can capture native or native-like structures from an ensemble of decoys generated as plausible candidates for the native structure. A scoring function must be fast enough in discriminating the native from unfolded/misfolded structures, and requires validation on a large data set(s) to generate sufficient confidence in the score. Here we develop a scoring function called pcSM that detects true native structure in the top 5 with 93% accuracy from an ensemble of candidate structures. If we eliminate the native from ensemble of decoys then pcSM is able to capture near native structure (RMSD < = 5 ?) in top 10 with 86% accuracy. The parameters considered in pcSM are a C-alpha Euclidean metric, secondary structural propensity, surface areas and an intramolecular energy function. pcSM has been tested on 415 systems consisting 142,698 decoys (public and CASP—largest reported hitherto in literature). The average rank for the native is 2.38, a significant improvement over that existing in literature. In-silico protein structure prediction requires robust scoring technique(s). Therefore, pcSM is easily amenable to integration into a successful protein structure prediction strategy. The tool is freely available at http://www.scfbio-iitd.res.in/software/pcsm.jsp.