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* Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas 77030; and
Department of Bioengineering, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005
Correspondence: Address reprint requests to Jianpeng Ma, 1 Baylor Plaza, BCM-125, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030. Tel.: 713-798-8187; Fax: 713-796-9438; E-mail: jpma{at}bcm.tmc.edu.
| ABSTRACT |
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| INTRODUCTION |
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atoms (16
atoms (36
Despite the phenomenal success of eNMA, however, one lingering question is not satisfactorily answered: why does eNMA work so well with such drastically coarse-grained representations of biomolecules? The commonly accepted explanation is that for large and densely packed systems like proteins, the low-frequency deformational modes are not sensitive to the local structural connectivity, rather it depends on the overall shape of the molecules (17
). Although this is an intriguing argument, it has not so far been quantitatively demonstrated. In fact, as a common practice, the similarity of eigenvectors from eNMA to the ones computed from realistic molecular mechanics force fields is often visually compared.
In this short article, we report some new results regarding this issue. We demonstrate that for any compact system that contains components with finite interaction distance, as long as the structure of the Hessian matrix (positions of nonzero and zero elements) is maintained, the low-frequency subspace of eigenvectors remains robustly similar even with completely randomized (nonzero) matrix elements. Since the elements of the Hessian matrix contain information on the strength and directionality of local molecular interactions, to randomize them is, as an approximation, to generalize the case into any kind of molecular interaction. Therefore, if the low-frequency subspace of eigenvector does not change upon matrix randomization, it is reasonable to argue that the following two commonly used schemes of harmonic modal analysis are just two special cases included in the randomized setthe scheme in NMA, in which the strength and directionality of interactions is derived from more accurate potential functions, and the scheme in eNMA with coarse-grained representations. Moreover, since the structure of the Hessian matrix is completely determined by molecular shape, therefore, if the above conclusion is true, it indicates that the low-frequency subspace of eigenvector is not sensitive to the detailed forms of molecular interactions, rather it is predominately determined by the shape of the molecule.
| METHODS AND RESULTS |
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-based eNMA (with a cutoff distance of 13 Å) (16The elements in the diagonal blocks were set as the negative sum of the corresponding elements in the off-diagonal blocks in a row. The symmetry of the entire Hessian matrix was kept. Fig. 1 a shows the comparison of the components of eigenvectors of mode 7, 10, and 30 for both proteins. It is clear that all components of the eigenvectors for mode 7 (the lowest-frequency mode) matched very well before and after the randomization. The level of matching decreases as the frequency goes up. In Fig. 1 b, we show the variation of mode 7 upon 10 independent randomizations of the Hessians. It is clear that this mode does not change much in both proteins. In Fig. 2, the dot products of modes before and after randomization were shown. If the dot product was calculated on a one-to-one basis along the modal index (circles), only a very few modes had high similarity (the values of dot product close to 1.0); the rest diversified quickly. If, however, a linear combination of modes was employed (squares), i.e., each eigenvector in the subspace after randomization was projected onto a linearly combined vector by the first 50 vibrational modes in the subspace before randomization, the subspace of low-frequency modes turned out to be very similar between two cases. These results indicate that the low-frequency subspace of eigenvectors is very robust upon randomization of matrix elements.
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10% positions of nonzero elements with those of zero elements, with a smaller incomplete low-frequency basis set, the eigenvectors after structure randomization can no longer be expressed by the subspace of low-frequency eigenvectors before the randomization, which sharply contrasts with the results in Fig. 2, where the low-frequency modes after randomization were expressed very well by linearly combined modes before randomization. Therefore, it suggests that the structure of the Hessian matrix is far more important in determining the nature of the low-frequency subspace of eigenvectors than the absolute values of matrix elements.
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to
on the C
-trace so as to be able to directly compare the results with C
-based eNMA (N is the number of atoms and n is the number of C
atoms). To do so, we first summed up the elements of a block of elements in a mass-weighted CHARMM Hessian that belong to a particular pair of residues to reduce to a 3 x 3 block. The three principal component axes of this smaller block were then computed and projected back onto the vector connecting two C
atoms to regenerate the values of elements for the smaller blocks. The projection obeys
where
,
(k = 1,2,3) are eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the 3 x 3 block and
is the direction vector between two C
atoms. For simplicity, only the residue pairs with strong positive projections were kept; weak and negative ones were regarded as no interaction. The final resulting matrix was used as a coarse-grained Hessian for diagonalization. Fig. 4 a shows that the modes after the coarse-graining matched the original modes well in low-frequency subspace, indicating the validity of the coarse-graining procedure. Fig. 4 b shows the matching between coarse-grained CHARMM modes and eNMA modes, which once again shows the similarity of low-frequency modes between CHARMM and eNMA once they are reduced to the same level of coarse-graining. Here, the deviation of modes as the frequency goes up (Fig. 4 b) is somewhat quicker than that in Fig. 2. This is partly because the structure of the Hessian matrix reduced from CHARMM calculation is not exactly the same as that from eNMA since the two methods used different cutoff distances and magnitudes of interactions. Fig. 5 shows the detailed structure of the two matrices for myoglobin. The matrix of eNMA (using a residue-based cutoff of 13 Å) is larger, and its area of nonzero elements completely overlaps the area of the reduced CHARMM matrix (using an atom-based cutoff). What is really important, however, is that the two matrix structures are similarone contains the other, thus the feature of low-frequency subspace is still similar. In fact, there have been numerous cases in which low-frequency modes from eNMA were used to approximate the modes traditionally computed by more accurate molecular mechanics force fields.
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| CONCLUDING DISCUSSION |
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Moreover, in this work, although results were presented for only two small proteins, an all-helical protein (myoglobin) and an all-sheet protein (A-spectrin SH3 domain), the conclusion holds true for all compact globular proteins or protein domains, just as the fact that eNMA is universally successful for all those proteins.
Another important observation is that in randomizing Hessian matrix elements, it is better to use more uniform distributions of random numbers with a smaller spread. We believe that this is consistent with the fact that protein structures are relatively uniform in terms of the distribution of mass and strength of interactions at residue level (41
). Imagine, for a bilobate molecule with drastically different stiffness in two domains, one would not be able to see the behavior we have seen. Such a conclusion is also in accord with the observation that eNMA with a uniform force constant is less effective in modeling the interfacial motions between protein and nucleic acid complexes precisely due to the difference in stiffness of the two types of molecules (42
).
A point worth mentioning is that the low-frequency modes of any macromolecule are highly anisotropic. Therefore, one of the important implications of our results is that the anisotropic motions of molecules are determined by their shape. This is intuitively reasonable. If we take a two-domain protein such as lysozyme to compute low-frequency modes at any level of coarse-graining, it is guaranteed that we will get the classic hinge-bending mode because of the bilobate shape of the molecule (43
45
). In fact, even if we reduce the representation of molecules to as simple as three points arranged in an angled fashion, we will still get the well-known bending mode as a triatomic water molecule. This example pictorially demonstrates that the global molecular shape determines its low-frequency anisotropic motions.
On the other hand, in the isotropic limit, the magnitudes of atomic fluctuation are mainly influenced by the local mass distribution. This was initially demonstrated in the pioneering work of the Gaussian network model (GNM) (46
). Recently, it was also shown that a residue-based fluctuation profile could also be estimated by a simple relation of 1/n, where n is the number of neighboring residues within a cutoff distance (47
). The 1/n result is essentially a first-degree approximation of GNM, and the results of the two methods are almost identical with a larger cutoff distance (>10 Å). These isotropic methods are very effective in explaining the fact that the peaks of crystallographic B-factor profiles for globular proteins are almost always on the surface residues since, for a given cutoff distance, they are the ones with a smaller number of neighbors. Of course, an implicit assumption behind these isotropic calculations is that the globular proteins are uniform in packing density and interaction stiffness. This is why the isotropic calculations are more effective for compact globular proteins.
Finally, it is also reasonable to deduce from our results that a main task of evolution is to select the right shape of molecules so as to preserve certain types of motion for fulfilling the functions. This is particularly true for large supramolecular complexes in which motions of components are evolved to be optimally coupled to the motions of complexes just as in many manmade machines (for a review, see Ma (48
)).
| ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS |
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Submitted on May 5, 2005; accepted for publication July 15, 2005.
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