Structure
Volume 15, Issue 12, 13 December 2007, Pages 1630-1641
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Article
Combining Efficient Conformational Sampling with a Deformable Elastic Network Model Facilitates Structure Refinement at Low Resolution

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Summary

Structural studies of large proteins and protein assemblies are a difficult and pressing challenge in molecular biology. Experiments often yield only low-resolution or sparse data that are not sufficient to fully determine atomistic structures. We have developed a general geometry-based algorithm that efficiently samples conformational space under constraints imposed by low-resolution density maps obtained from electron microscopy or X-ray crystallography experiments. A deformable elastic network (DEN) is used to restrain the sampling to prior knowledge of an approximate structure. The DEN restraints dramatically reduce over-fitting, especially at low resolution. Crossvalidation is used to optimally weight the structural information and experimental data. Our algorithm is robust even for noise-added density maps and has a large radius of convergence for our test case. The DEN restraints can also be used to enhance reciprocal space simulated annealing refinement.

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