Model completion by extraction of secondary structure and reassembly

Author(s)

Purpose

Try to complete a model by extracting all the secondary structure elements (helices and strands), rearranging and reconnecting them into a new model.

How Model Completion works:

Model completion is based on the idea that the helices and strands in protein model are generally correct, while the loops connecting them may be inaccurate or even connect the wrong helices and strands.

Model completion first identifies secondary structure in a model. Then it examines all the loops connecting these helices and strands in the model and keeps the best-fitting and most plausible loops intact. All the other loops are removed from the model, resulting in a set of fragments representing part of the structure. The sequence assignments and connectivities of these fragments are then removed so that any fragment can potentially be connected to any other fragment.

The core step in model completion is identification of all plausible connections between ends of fragments in this partial model. Connections that were present in the supplied model are considered in this step along with potential connections that are found by tracing from one fragment to another through high density in the density map. Each possible connection is scored based on a set of criteria including (1) the lowest density at or between main-chain atom positions, (2) the maximum difference in density between adjacent main-chain atom positions and (3) length of the connection (and other criteria as well).

All possible arrangements of the available fragments and connections that use all the availble fragments (in either forward or reverse directions) are then considered using an iterative connection algorithm. Pairs of fragments are listed, then all pairs of pairs (triples). Then larger groupings are assembled using the higher scoring sets of smaller groupings (typically the top half are considered at each stage), until a set of potential complete chains are obtained. At this stage a chain is a CA-only model. All the CA-only models are then converted to full chains using PULCHRA (Rotkiewicz & Skolnick 2008) followed by adding side-chains with phenix.sequence_from_map.

The potential complete chains obtained typically have many duplicate parts but differ in connectivity. Complete chains are scored in manner similar to that used above for fragments, with an additional contribution to the score based on the match between the supplied sequence and side-chain density along a chain.

The highest-scoring complete chains are then optimized by recombination among these chains followed by real-space refinement. The optimized chains are rescored and the top resulting chains are provided.

Examples

Standard run of model_completion:

Running model_completion is easy. From the command-line you can type:

phenix.model_completion my_model.pdb my_map.mrc resolution=3 nproc=8

This will attempt to complete my_model.pdb based on the map my_map.mrc at a resolution of 3 A using 8 processors.

Possible Problems

Specific limitations and problems:

Literature

Additional information

List of all available keywords