Mining the characteristic interaction patterns on protein-protein binding interfaces.

Protein-protein interactions are observed in various biological processes. They are important for understanding the underlying molecular mechanisms and can be potential targets for developing small-molecule regulators of such processes. Previous studies suggest that certain residues on protein-protein binding interfaces are "hot spots". As an extension to this concept, we have developed a residue-based method to identify the characteristic interaction patterns (CIPs) on protein-protein binding interfaces, in which each pattern is a cluster of four contacting residues. Systematic analysis was conducted on a nonredundant set of 1,222 protein-protein binding interfaces selected out of the entire Protein Data Bank. Favored interaction patterns across different protein-protein binding interfaces were retrieved by considering both geometrical and chemical conservations. As demonstrated on two test tests, our method was able to predict hot spot residues on protein-protein binding interfaces with good recall scores and acceptable precision scores. By analyzing the function annotations and the evolutionary tree of the protein-protein complexes in our data set, we also observed that protein-protein interfaces sharing common characteristic interaction patterns are normally associated with identical or similar biological functions.