Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on October 12, 2007
Bioinformatics 2007 23(21):2851-2858; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btm480
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Creating protein models from electron-density maps using particle-filtering methods
1Department of Computer Sciences, 2Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, 3Department of Biochemistry and 4Center for Eukaryotic Structural Genomics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA
*To whom correspondence should be addressed.
| Abstract |
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Motivation: One bottleneck in high-throughput protein crystallography is interpreting an electron-density map, that is, fitting a molecular model to the 3D picture crystallography produces. Previously, we developed ACMI (Automatic Crystallographic Map Interpreter), an algorithm that uses a probabilistic model to infer an accurate protein backbone layout. Here, we use a sampling method known as particle filtering to produce a set of all-atom protein models. We use the output of ACMI to guide the particle filter's sampling, producing an accurate, physically feasible set of structures.
Results: We test our algorithm on 10 poor-quality experimental density maps. We show that particle filtering produces accurate all-atom models, resulting in fewer chains, lower sidechain RMS error and reduced R factor, compared to simply placing the best-matching sidechains on ACMI's trace. We show that our approach produces a more accurate model than three leading methods—TEXTAL, RESOLVE and ARP/WARP—in terms of main chain completeness, sidechain identification and crystallographic R factor.
Availability: Source code and experimental density maps available at http://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/machine-learning/shavlik-group/programs/acmi/
Contact: dimaio{at}cs.wisc.edu
Associate Editor: Burkhard Rost
Received on August 31, 2007; accepted on September 20, 2007