David Baker and colleagues at the University of Washington and the University of Cambridge in England developed a novel computational method for predicting protein structure based only on its amino acid sequence. Thanks to multitudes of users involved with Rosetta@home, a distributed computing project, the group’s methodology and its successful application is being reported in the latest Nature.
From the statement issued by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute:
Over the past decade, Baker and his colleagues have made steady progress in developing computer algorithms to predict how a string of amino acids will fold into a given protein’s characteristic shape. This intricate folding is molded by the complex molecular side chains that project from the backbone of the protein and can interact in myriad ways, making such predictions far from straightforward. Among the team’s chief computational tools is a program called Rosetta that calculates which of a protein’s potential shapes is most efficient, or lowest in energy.
One of the thorniest problems Baker and his colleagues have faced with their algorithm is that folding proteins can get stuck in partially folded structures. Predicting protein structure involves finding a structure that has lower energy than any other structures the protein could adopt. “We might have developed a protein structure that is close to the right structure, but not quite there,” said Baker. “You might think we could just wiggle the structure around and shake it computationally, but sometimes the energy barriers are so high that the protein just gets stuck in that shape. So, that’s where we were stymied in our technique.”
In the Nature article, Baker and colleagues reported a new strategy of “targeted rebuilding and refining” to overcome this hurdle. In this method, Rosetta identifies the regions most likely to give rise to misleading interim structures and isolates them for “targeted rebuilding.”
“It’s as if you have this complex coil of rope, and there is a section that you think just doesn’t behave the way it should,” explained Baker. “So you just cut it out, reconnect the ends, and computationally explore different conformations of just that section until you have a better model of its behavior.”
If a single round of this rebuilding and refinement does not produce the lowest-energy structure of a folded protein, the researchers repeat the analysis, using a selection process inspired by natural evolution. Each iteration produces a set of structurally different models, from which those lowest in energy are chosen for the next round of computational rebuilding and refinement. Ultimately, the lowest energy model wins out.
“It’s as if you had many species of animals all competing with one another,” said Baker. “The idea is that you take the fittest from each population and let those compete, ultimately arriving at the fittest animal of all.”
The paper “represents a real breakthrough,” wrote structural biologist Eleanor Dodson in a News & Views editorial also published online by Nature. Dodson writes, “This approach demonstrates real progress in several respects: the use of enormous computational power; the exploitation of known three-dimensional structures; the development of powerful search algorithms that relate those structures to new sequences; and the steadily improving tactics used to determine low-energy conformations of molecules.
“The benefits will be seen in structure-based drug design and in improved models for crystallographic calculations. And in the future, this method might provide structural information about intractable molecules that are difficult to study experimentally,” wrote Dodson, who is at the University of York in the United Kingdom.
Baker and his colleagues demonstrated the value of their technique by using it to improve data on protein structures derived using both x-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. NMR spectroscopy analyzes the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei in molecules to gain insight into their structure. While both techniques are highly useful in analyzing protein structure, the data they yield have ambiguities that predictive protein structure modeling can resolve, said Baker. Specifically, they noted that the new computational method alleviates the crystallographic phase problem for small proteins by generating high accuracy atomic level models from which phases can be estimated.
The researchers also used their technique to successfully model numerous proteins whose structures were known. For many of these, they combined their computational analysis with data from experimental techniques. In the most dramatic test, however, they accurately predicted the three-dimensional shape of a protein based only on its string-like 112-unit amino acid sequence.
Press release: New Approach Builds Better Proteins Inside a Computer …
Rosetta@home …
