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Title

 

 

 

 

 

A study of interface roughness of heteromeric obligate and non-obligate protein-protein complexes

 

Authors

 

Indrani Bera 1, Somak Ray 2,*

 

Affiliation

 

1 Structural Biology & Bioinformatics Division, Indian Institute of Chemical Biolgy, Jadavpur, Kolkata 700032, India; 2 Brookline, MA 02446, USA

 

Email

 

somak.ray@gmail.com

Article Type

 

Hypothesis

Date

 

Received September 15, 2009; Accepted October 13, 2009; Published November 18, 2009

 

Abstract

A number of studies aimed to distinguish the structural patterns at the interfaces of heteromeric obligate and non-obligate protein-protein complexes. These studies revealed better geometric complementarity of protomers in obligate complexes over non-obligates. We showed that protein surface roughness can be used to explain this observation. Using smoothened atomic fractal dimension (SAFD) as a descriptor, this work investigates the role of interface roughness in the molecular recognition of these two types of protein-protein complexes. We studied 52 obligate and 62 non-obligate heteromeric high quality crystal structures from benchmark data sets. We found that distribution of interface roughness values obligate and non-obligates are quite similar. However we found a distinct preference for obligate protomers to complex with chains having similar roughness. The roughness pairing is correlated in obligates only. The later indicates, an increase/decrease of roughness in one chain causes a proportional change in roughness in its binding partner. Based on these observations we proposed that similar and correlated roughness pairing leads to more interdigitation and contacts at the interface leading to better geometric fit in obligates. We propose that roughness information can find useful application in improving machine learning based complex type classifiers and filtering protein-protein docking solutions.

 

Keywords

PPI, roughness, protein, interaction, complexes

 

Citation

 

Bera & Ray, Bioinformation 4(5): 210-215 (2009)

Edited by

 

P. Kangueane

 

ISSN

 

0973-2063

 

Publisher

 

Biomedical Informatics

License

 

 

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.