Applied Bioinformatics Laboratory, the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66047, USA.
Proteins. 2012 Jan;80(1):81-92. doi: 10.1002/prot.23163. Epub 2011 Oct 5.
Designing proteins with enhanced thermo-stability has been a main focus of protein engineering because of its theoretical and practical significance. Despite extensive studies in the past years, a general strategy for stabilizing proteins still remains elusive. Thus effective and robust computational algorithms for designing thermo-stable proteins are in critical demand. Here we report PROTS, a sequential and structural four-residue fragment based protein thermo-stability potential. PROTS is derived from a nonredundant representative collection of thousands of thermophilic and mesophilic protein structures and a large set of point mutations with experimentally determined changes of melting temperatures. To the best of our knowledge, PROTS is the first protein stability predictor based on integrated analysis and mining of these two types of data. Besides conventional cross validation and blind testing, we introduce hypothetical reverse mutations as a means of testing the robustness of protein thermo-stability predictors. In all tests, PROTS demonstrates the ability to reliably predict mutation induced thermo-stability changes as well as classify thermophilic and mesophilic proteins. In addition, this white-box predictor allows easy interpretation of the factors that influence mutation induced protein stability changes at the residue level.
设计具有增强热稳定性的蛋白质一直是蛋白质工程的主要关注点,因为它具有理论和实际意义。尽管在过去的几年中进行了广泛的研究,但稳定蛋白质的一般策略仍然难以捉摸。因此,设计热稳定蛋白质的有效和强大的计算算法是非常需要的。在这里,我们报告了 PROTS,这是一种基于顺序和结构的四残基片段的蛋白质热稳定性势能。PROTS 源自数千个嗜热和嗜中性蛋白质结构的非冗余代表性集合,以及大量具有实验确定的熔点变化的点突变。据我们所知,PROTS 是第一个基于这两种类型数据的综合分析和挖掘的蛋白质稳定性预测器。除了传统的交叉验证和盲测之外,我们还引入了假设的反向突变作为测试蛋白质热稳定性预测器稳健性的一种手段。在所有测试中,PROTS 都能够可靠地预测突变引起的热稳定性变化,并对嗜热和嗜中性蛋白质进行分类。此外,这个白盒预测器允许在残基水平上轻松解释影响突变诱导蛋白质稳定性变化的因素。