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Large-scale determination of previously unsolved protein structures using evolutionary information
Open accessAbstract
The prediction of the structures of proteins without detectable sequence similarity to any protein of known structure remains an outstanding scientific challenge. Here we report significant progress in this area. We first describe de novo blind structure predictions of unprecendented accuracy we made for two proteins in large families in the recent CASP11 blind test of protein structure prediction methods by incorporating residue-residue co-evolution information in the Rosetta structure prediction program. We then describe the use of this method to generate structure models for 58 of the 121 large protein families in prokaryotes for which three-dimensional structures are not available. These models, which are posted online for public access, provide structural information for the over 400,000 proteins belonging to the 58 families and suggest hypotheses about mechanism for the subset for which the function is known, and hypotheses about function for the remainder.
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![Figure 9. PrsW is an intramembrane protease that is crucial in the resistance to antimicrobial peptides. (A) Location of the top co-evolving residue pairs. Our model of PrsW (B) contains a 4TMH substructure ([TMHs 3–6], (C) which is very similar to a substructure of type II CAAX prenyl protease [TMHs 4–7; D]). The predicted active site residues in PrsW motifs EExxK (TMH3; blue spheres, C) and HxxxD (TMH6; red spheres, C) are in positions similar to those of conserved residues in motifs EExxxR (TMH4; blue spheres, D) and HxxxN (TMH7; red spheres, D) of type II CAAX prenyl protease. Another conserved histidine in the fifth TMH of PrsW (but absent in type II CAAX prenyl protease) is also located in the predicted active site of PrsW (black sphere). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.09248.015](/paper-figures/8029d45422d340c69f4ca87cf9b33a50/large-scale-determination-of-previously-unsolved-protein-structures-using-figure-9.jpg)


![Figure 12. Predicted structures of YqfA and YhhN have topologies similar to G protein-coupled receptors (GPCR-like). The core seven TM helix (TMH) fold exhibited by members of the GPCR superfamily is colored in rainbow from the N- to the C-terminus. (A) Bacteriorhodopsin binds retinal (pink spheres) in a pocket formed by TMH3-7 [PDB ID: 1m0k]. (B) The agonist (pink spheres) binding site of P2Y12 receptor is formed by the same set of helices [PDB ID: 4pxz]. (C) A co-evolution-based structure model for YhhN has the GPCR topology with an N-terminal TMH extension. Conserved residues that might form an active site (magenta spheres) cluster in a similar place as the YqfA catalytic residues. (D) Our co-evolution-based structure model for YqfA has a GPCR like topology and clusters residues that may form an active site (magenta spheres mark the Calpha position) in a region that corresponds to the GPCR ligand-binding pocket. (E) Side and top view of the TMalign superposition of YqfA model (in rainbow) over the recently released 3wxw (in white) human ortholog. The N- and C-terminal loops were trimmed for clarity. The TMalign score between the model and the homolog is 0.8. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.09248.018](/paper-figures/e14117d02140476087ee2af7a9d1b445/large-scale-determination-of-previously-unsolved-protein-structures-using-figure-12.jpg)






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“Traditional computational prediction pipelines reliant on inter-residue distance restraints calculated from deep multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) have historically struggled to accurately predict the structures of these proteins and their movements.”
From Sampling alternative conformational states of transporters and receptors with AlphaFold2 (2022) · cites this paper as Ovchinnikov et al., 2015
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Cites
TM-align: a protein structure alignment algorithm based on the TM-score
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Protein Structure Prediction Using Rosetta
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Research works printed but not linked: 1
- Hayat, 2014, Accurate prediction of transmembrane β-barrel proteins from sequences, 10.1101/006577 · DOI
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The coming of age of de novo protein design
Huang, P.-S., Boyken, S. E., & Baker, D. (2016) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature19946 · Cited by 1,478
“…are selected for experimental characterization. d , Blind, de novo structure prediction (left) for the critical assessment of protein structure prediction (CASP)11 target T0806, which has no sequence similarity to any protein of known structure, using coevolution-derived contact constraints 27 .”
BackgroundSelf-citationUnified rational protein engineering with sequence-based deep representation learning
Alley, E. C., Khimulya, G., Biswas, S., AlQuraishi, M., & Church, G. M. (2019) · Nature Methods · doi:10.1038/s41592-019-0598-1 · Cited by 1,131
Advances in protein structure prediction and design
Kuhlman, B., & Bradley, P. (2019) · Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology · doi:10.1038/s41580-019-0163-x · Cited by 806
Mutation effects predicted from sequence co-variation
Hopf, T. A., Ingraham, J. B., Poelwijk, F. J., Schärfe, C. P. I., Springer, M., Sander, C., & Marks, D. S. (2017) · Nature Biotechnology · doi:10.1038/nbt.3769 · Cited by 775
Metadata
- Authors
- Ovchinnikov, S., Kinch, L., Park, H., Liao, Y., Pei, J., Kim, D. E., Kamisetty, H., Grishin, N. V., & Baker, D.
- Affiliations
- University of Washington (US)
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US)
- The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (US)
- Meta (United States) (US)
- Corresponding author
- Baker, David
- ORCID
- Venue
- eLife
- Publisher
- eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
- Published
- 2015-09-03
- Volume
- 4
- Pages
- e09248-e09248
- ISSN
- 2050-084X (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4602095
- OpenAlex
- W1895528264
- Cited by
- 222
- References
- 80
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 17 · 2021: 20 · 2020: 25 · 2019: 42 · 2018: 30 · 2017: 39 · 2016: 24 · 2015: 4
- FWCI
- 14.18
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- eLife (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health (NIH) (R01GM092802, GM094575)
- Welch Foundation (Robert A. Welch Foundation) (I-1505)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Protein Structure and Dynamics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Structural Biology › Enzyme Structure and Function
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › RNA and protein synthesis mechanisms
- Keywords
- protein structure prediction, de novo structure prediction, Rosetta, prokaryotic proteins, structural model, protein function prediction, evolutionary information
- MeSH terms
- Bacterial Proteins, Models, Molecular, Protein Conformation, Evolution, Molecular, Computational Biology
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