Directional adjacency-score function for protein fold recognition

Introduction: It is a challenge to design a protein score function which stabilizes the native structures of many proteins simultaneously. The coarse-grained description of proteins to construct the pairwise-contact score function usually ignores the backbone directionality of protein structures. We propose a new two-body score function which stabilizes all native states of 1,006 proteins simultaneously. This two-body score function differs from the usual pairwise-contact functions in that it considers two adjacent amino acids at two ends of each peptide bond with the backbone directionality from the N-terminal to the C-terminal. The score is a corresponding propensity for a directional alignment of two adjacent amino acids with their local environments. Results and Discussion: We show that the construction of a directional adjacency-score function was achieved using 1,006 training proteins with the sequence homology less than 30%, which include all representatives of different protein classes. After parameterizing the local environments of amino acids into 9 categories depending on three secondary structures and three kinds of hydrophobicity of amino acids, the 32,400 adjacency-scores of amino acids could be determined by the perceptron learning and the protein threading. These could stabilize simultaneously all native folds of 1,006 training proteins. When these parameters are tested on the new distinct 382 proteins with the sequence homology less than 90%, 371 (97.1%) proteins could recognize their native folds. We also showed using these parameters that the retro sequence of the SH3 domain, the B domain of Staphylococcal protein A, and the B1 domain of Streptococcal protein G could not be stabilized to fold, which agrees with the experimental evidence.