Large scale determination of previously unsolved protein structures using evolutionary information
- University of Washington, United States
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, United States
- University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, United States
- Facebook Inc., United States
Abstract
The prediction of the structures of proteins without detectablesequence similarity to any protein of known structure remains anoutstanding scientific challenge. Here we describe de novo blindstructure predictions of unprecedented accuracy for two proteins in large families made in the recent CASP11 blind test of protein structure prediction methods by incorporating residue-residue co-evolution information in the Rosetta structure prediction program. We then use the method to generate structure models for 58 of the 121 large protein families in prokaryotes for which three dimensionalstructures are not available. These models, which are posted online for public access, provide structural information for the over 400,000 proteins belonging to the 58 families and suggest hypotheses about mechanism for the subset for which the function is known, and hypotheses about function for the remainder.
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© 2015, Ovchinnikov et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Large scale determination of previously unsolved protein structures using evolutionary information
eLife 4:e09248.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.09248
Further reading
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- Structural Biology and Molecular Biophysics
In eukaryotes, RNAs transcribed by RNA Pol II are modified at the 5′ end with a 7-methylguanosine (m7G) cap, which is recognized by the nuclear cap binding complex (CBC). The CBC plays multiple important roles in mRNA metabolism, including transcription, splicing, polyadenylation, and export. It promotes mRNA export through direct interaction with a key mRNA export factor, ALYREF, which in turn links the TRanscription and EXport (TREX) complex to the 5′ end of mRNA. However, the molecular mechanism for CBC-mediated recruitment of the mRNA export machinery is not well understood. Here, we present the first structure of the CBC in complex with an mRNA export factor, ALYREF. The cryo-EM structure of CBC-ALYREF reveals that the RRM domain of ALYREF makes direct contact with both the NCBP1 and NCBP2 subunits of the CBC. Comparing CBC-ALYREF with other cellular complexes containing CBC and/or ALYREF components provides insights into the coordinated events during mRNA transcription, splicing, and export.
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- Structural Biology and Molecular Biophysics
Under physiological conditions, proteins continuously undergo structural fluctuations on different timescales. Some conformations are only sparsely populated, but still play a key role in protein function. Thus, meaningful structure–function frameworks must include structural ensembles rather than only the most populated protein conformations. To detail protein plasticity, modern structural biology combines complementary experimental and computational approaches. In this review, we survey available computational approaches that integrate sparse experimental data from electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy with molecular modeling techniques to derive all-atom structural models of rare protein conformations. We also propose strategies to increase the reliability and improve efficiency using deep learning approaches, thus advancing the field of integrative structural biology.
