Biomedical subjects

Stephen R Comeau

Publications and source records attributed to Stephen R Comeau.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

PIPER: an FFT-based protein docking program with pairwise potentials.

The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) correlation approach to protein-protein docking can evaluate the energies of billions of docked conformations on a grid if the energy is described in the form of a correlation function. Here, this restriction is removed, and the approach is efficiently used with pairwise interaction potentials that substantially improve the docking results. The basic idea is approximating the interaction matrix by its eigenvectors corresponding to the few dominant eigenvalues, resulting in an energy expression written as the sum of a few correlation functions, and solving the problem by repeated FFT calculations. In addition to describing how the method is implemented, we present a novel class of structure-based pairwise intermolecular potentials. The DARS (Decoys As the Reference State) potentials are extracted from structures of protein-protein complexes and use large sets of docked conformations as decoys to derive atom pair distributions in the reference state. The current version of the DARS potential works well for enzyme-inhibitor complexes. With the new FFT-based program, DARS provides much better docking results than the earlier approaches, in many cases generating 50% more near-native docked conformations. Although the potential is far from optimal for antibody-antigen pairs, the results are still slightly better than those given by an earlier FFT method. The docking program PIPER is freely available for noncommercial applications.

Antibodies↗

PubMed2005

Performance of the first protein docking server ClusPro in CAPRI rounds 3-5.

To evaluate the current status of the protein-protein docking field, the CAPRI experiment came to life. Researchers are given the receptor and ligand 3-dimensional (3D) coordinates before the cocrystallized complex is published. Human predictions of the complex structure are supposed to be submitted within 3 weeks, whereas the server ClusPro has only 24 h and does not make use of any biochemical information. From the 10 targets analyzed in the second evaluation meeting of CAPRI, ClusPro was able to predict meaningful models for 5 targets using only empirical free energy estimates. For two of the targets, the server predictions were assessed to be among the best in the field. Namely, for Targets 8 and 12, ClusPro predicted the model with the most accurate binding-site interface and the model with the highest percentage of nativelike contacts, among 180 and 230 submissions, respectively. After CAPRI, the server has been further developed to predict oligomeric assemblies, and new tools now allow the user to restrict the search for the complex to specific regions on the protein surface, significantly enhancing the predictive capabilities of the server. The performance of ClusPro in CAPRI Rounds 3-5 suggests that clustering the low free energy (i.e., desolvation and electrostatic energy) conformations of a homogeneous conformational sampling of the binding interface is a fast and reliable procedure to detect protein-protein interactions and eliminate false positives. Not including targets that had a significant structural rearrangement upon binding, the success rate of ClusPro was found to be around 71%.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2005

Predicting oligomeric assemblies: N-mers a primer.

Multi-protein complexes play key roles in many biological processes. However, since the structures of these assemblies are hard to resolve experimentally, the detailed mechanism of how they work cooperatively in the cell has remained elusive. Similarly, recent advances on in silico prediction of protein-protein interactions have so far avoided this difficult problem. In this paper, we present a general algorithm to predict molecular assemblies of homo-oligomers. Given the number of N-mers and the 3D structure of one monomer, the method samples all the possible symmetries that N-mers can be assembled. Based on a scoring function that clusters the low free energy structures at each binding interface, the algorithm predicts the complex structure as well as the symmetry of the protein assembly. The method is quite general and does not involve any free parameters. The algorithm has been implemented as a public server and integrated to the protein-protein complex prediction server ClusPro. Using this application, we validated predictions for trimers, tetramers (discriminating between dimer of dimers and 4-fold symmetry structures), pentamers and hexamers (discriminating between trimer of dimers, dimer of trimers, and 6-fold symmetry structures), for a total of 107 assemblies. For 85% of the multimers, the server predicts the complex structure within an average rms deviation of 2A from the full crystal. For complexes that involve more than one binding interface, the cluster size at each surface provides a strong indication as to which interface forms first. With improving scoring functions and computer power, our multimer docking approach could be used as a framework to address the more general problem of multi-protein assemblies.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2004

ClusPro: a fully automated algorithm for protein-protein docking.

ClusPro (http://nrc.bu.edu/cluster) represents the first fully automated, web-based program for the computational docking of protein structures. Users may upload the coordinate files of two protein structures through ClusPro's web interface, or enter the PDB codes of the respective structures, which ClusPro will then download from the PDB server (http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/). The docking algorithms evaluate billions of putative complexes, retaining a preset number with favorable surface complementarities. A filtering method is then applied to this set of structures, selecting those with good electrostatic and desolvation free energies for further clustering. The program output is a short list of putative complexes ranked according to their clustering properties, which is automatically sent back to the user via email.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2004

ClusPro: an automated docking and discrimination method for the prediction of protein complexes.

MOTIVATION: Predicting protein interactions is one of the most challenging problems in functional genomics. Given two proteins known to interact, current docking methods evaluate billions of docked conformations by simple scoring functions, and in addition to near-native structures yield many false positives, i.e. structures with good surface complementarity but far from the native. RESULTS: We have developed a fast algorithm for filtering docked conformations with good surface complementarity, and ranking them based on their clustering properties. The free energy filters select complexes with lowest desolvation and electrostatic energies. Clustering is then used to smooth the local minima and to select the ones with the broadest energy wells-a property associated with the free energy at the binding site. The robustness of the method was tested on sets of 2000 docked conformations generated for 48 pairs of interacting proteins. In 31 of these cases, the top 10 predictions include at least one near-native complex, with an average RMSD of 5 A from the native structure. The docking and discrimination method also provides good results for a number of complexes that were used as targets in the Critical Assessment of PRedictions of Interactions experiment. AVAILABILITY: The fully automated docking and discrimination server ClusPro can be found at http://structure.bu.edu

Algorithms↗