Abstract
Motivation Quaternary structure determination for proteins is difficult especially for transmembrane proteins. Even if the monomeric constituents of complexes have been experimentally resolved, computational prediction of quaternary structures is a challenging task particularly for higher order complexes. It is essential to have a reliable computational protocol to predict quaternary structures of both transmembrane and soluble proteins leveraging experimentally determined distance restraints and/or cyclic symmetry (Cn symmetry) found in most homo-oligomeric transmembrane proteins.
Results We survey 115 X-ray crystallographically solved structures of homo-oligomeric transmembrane proteins (HoTPs) to discover that 90% of them are Cn symmetric. Given the prevalence of Cn symmetric HoTPs and the benefits of incorporating geometry restraints in aiding quaternary structure determination, we introduce two new filters, the distance-restraints (DR) filter and the Symmetry-Imposed Packing (SIP) filter which takes advantage of the statistically derived tilt angle cutoff and the Cn symmetry of HoTPs without prior knowledge of the number (“n”) of monomers. Using only the geometrical filter, SIP, near-native poses of the 115 HoTPs can be correctly identified in the top-5 for 52% of all cases, or 49% among the HoTPs having an n >2 (~60% of the dataset), while ZDOCK alone returns 41% and 24%, respectively. Applying only SIP to three HoTPs with distance restraints, the near-native poses for two HoTPs are ranked 1st and the other 7th among 54,000 possible decoys. With both filters, the two remain 1st while the other improved to 2nd. While a soluble system with distance restraints is recovered at the 1st-ranked pose by applying only DR.
Availability and Implementation https://github.com/capslockwizard/drsip
Supplementary information Supplementary methods and results are available.
