Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
The key limitations imposed on the SCMF and DEE are (i) the
backbone/template is fixed, and (ii) sequence search is restricted to a
discrete set of rotamers. In their application of the SCMF method,
Koehl and Delarue [28-30] refined iteratively a conformational matrix
whose element CM ( i,j ) gives the probability that side chain i of a pro-
tein takes on rotamer j . Hence CM ( i,j ) sums to unity over all possible
rotamers for a given side chain i . With an initial guess for the confor-
mational matrix, which is usually based on the assumption that all
rotamers had the same probability, that is, for rotamer k of residue i :
1
CM i k
(, )
=
(1)
K i
for k
=
1, 2,
, K i . The mean-field potential E ( i,k ) is calculated using [28]:
K
N
j
Ei k
(, )
=
U x
(
)
+
U x
(
,
x
)
+
CM j lU x
( ,) (
,
x
)
(2)
ikC
ikC
0
C
ikC
j
lC
j
=≠
1
,
j
i
l
=
1
where x 0 C corresponds to the coordinates of the atoms in the template,
and x ikC corresponds to the coordinates of the atoms of residue i whose
conformation is described by rotamer k . Lennard-Jones (12-6) potential
can be used for the potential energy U [28]. Energies of the K i possible
rotamers of residue i can subsequently be converted into probabilities
using the Boltzmann law:
Eik
RT
Eil
RT
(, )
e
CM
(, )
i k
=
1
(3)
(,)
K i
e
l
=
1
CM 1 ( i,k ) provides an update on CM ( i,k ) which can be used to repeat the
calculation of energies and another update on the conformational
matrix until convergence is attained. The convergence criterion is usu-
ally set as 10 −4 to define self-consistency [28]. In addition, oscillations
during convergence could be removed by updating CM 1 ( i,k ) with a
“memory” of the previous step [28]:
CM
=
λ
CM
+
(
λ
)
CM
(4)
1
where optimal step size l was found to be 0.9 [28]. The main disadvan-
tage of SCMF is that though it is deterministic in nature, it does not
guarantee to yield a global minimum in energy [26].
 
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