PubMed · 8966608
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S A Benner, D L Geroff, J D Rozzell. 1996-11-29. Protein structure prediction.. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8966608/
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Vibrational excitations of low frequency collective modes are essential for functionally important conformational transitions in proteins. Here we report the first direct measurement on the lifetime of vibrational excitations of the collective modes at 87 microm (115 cm(-1)) in bacteriorhodopsin, a transmembrane protein. The data show that these modes have extremely long lifetime of vibrational excitations, over 500 ps, accommodating 1500 vibrations. We suggest that there is a connection between this relatively slow anharmonic relaxation rate of approximately 10(9) sec(-1) and the similar observed rate of conformational transitions in proteins, which require multilevel vibrational excitations.
We show that a protein can be trained to recognize multiple conformations, analogous to an associative memory, and provide capacity calculations based on energy fluctuations and information theory. Unlike the linear capacity of a Hopfield network, the number of conformations which can be remembered by a protein sequence depends on the size of the amino acid alphabet as lnA, independent of protein length. This admits the possibility of certain proteins, such as prions, evolving to fold to independent stable conformations, as well as novel possibilities for protein and heteropolymer design.
A new phase-extension procedure has been applied to isomorphous replacement data and shown to yield improved phases and maps compared with standard solvent flattening operating on a full set of centroid phases. In this procedure, a starting subset of core phases is selected based on the sharpness of the phase-probability curves. Phase extension using solvent flattening as the density-modification procedure is then carried out, gradually adding additional phases. In tests with known protein structures, the mean phase errors for the output expanded phase sets were reduced by 3-9 degrees and the corresponding map correlation coefficients were increased by 0.05-0.18 relative to phase sets from standard solvent-flattening procedures. With SIR data, the lowest final mean phase errors were approximately 58 degrees and the corresponding map correlation coefficients were in the range 0.53-0.68.