Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

2-2014

Abstract

Binding free energy and binding hot spots at protein-protein interfaces are two important research areas for understanding protein interactions. Computational methods have been developed previously for accurate prediction of binding free energy change upon mutation for interfacial residues. However, a large number of interrupted and unimportant atomic contacts are used in the training phase which caused accuracy loss. Results: This work proposes a new method, β ACV ASA , to predict the change of binding free energy after alanine mutations. β ACV ASA integrates accessible surface area (ASA) and our newly defined β contacts together into an atomic contact vector (ACV). A β contact between two atoms is a direct contact without being interrupted by any other atom between them. A β contact’s potential contribution to protein binding is also supposed to be inversely proportional to its ASA to follow the water exclusion hypothesis of binding hot spots. Tested on a dataset of 396 alanine mutations, our method is found to be superior in classification performance to many other methods, including Robetta, FoldX, HotPOINT, an ACV method of β contacts without ASA integration, and ACV ASA methods (similar to β ACV ASA but based on distance-cutoff contacts). Based on our data analysis and results, we can draw conclusions that: (i) our method is powerful in the prediction of binding free energy change after alanine mutation; (ii) β contacts are better than distance-cutoff contacts for modeling the well-organized protein-binding interfaces; (iii) β contacts usually are only a small fraction number of the distance-based contacts; and (iv) water exclusion is a necessary condition for a residue to become a binding hot spot. Conclusions: β ACV ASA is designed using the advantages of both β contacts and water exclusion. It is an excellent tool to predict binding free energy changes and binding hot spots after alanine mutation.

Keywords

Free Energy Change, Voronoi Diagram, Atomic Type, Accessible Surface Area, Interfacial Residue

Discipline

Bioinformatics | Databases and Information Systems

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

BMC Bioinformatics

Volume

15

Issue

1

First Page

57-1

Last Page

10

ISSN

1471-2105

Identifier

10.1186/1471-2105-15-57

Publisher

BioMed Central

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-15-57

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