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Selected Papers from the 11th Computational Structural Bioinformatics Workshop (CSBW-2018)

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A special issue of Molecules (ISSN 1420-3049).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (14 January 2019) | Viewed by 27821

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Prof. Dr. Filip Jagodzinski

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Guest Editor

Department of Computer Science, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA 98225, USA
Interests: computational structural biology; computational proteomics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Dr. Brian Y. Chen

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Guest Editor

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Lehigh University, Building "C", 113 Research Drive, Room 330, Bethlehem, PA 18015-3006, USA
Interests: structural bioinformatics

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue is related to the 11th Computational Structural Biology Workshop (CSBW), which will be held on 29 August 2018, co-located with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB) Conference in Washington D.C.

The rapid accumulation of macromolecular structures presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities in the analysis, comparison, modeling, and prediction of biomolecules and their interactions. CSBW annually brings together researchers with expertise in bioinformatics, computational biology, structural biology, data mining, optimization and high performance computing, to discuss new results, techniques, and research problems in computational structural bioinformatics. The novel methodological contributions presented at CSBW are driven by important biological problems and further our knowledge and understanding of the role of macromolecular structure in biological processes.

Participants of CSBW 2018 are cordially invited to contribute original research papers to this Special Issue of Molecules.

Dr. Filip Jagodzinski
Dr. Brian Y. Chen
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Molecules is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

computational structural biology
structural genomics
macromolecular structure and function
structural dynamics interactions and assemblies

Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

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18 pages, 18888 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Modeling the Tertiary Structure of the Rift Valley Fever Virus L Protein

by Gideon K. Gogovi, Fahad Almsned, Nicole Bracci, Kylene Kehn-Hall, Amarda Shehu and Estela Blaisten-Barojas

Molecules 2019, 24(9), 1768; https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules24091768 - 07 May 2019

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 3340

Abstract

A tertiary structure governs, to a great extent, the biological activity of a protein in the living cell and is consequently a central focus of numerous studies aiming to shed light on cellular processes central to human health. Here, we aim to elucidate the structure of the Rift Valley fever virus (RVFV) L protein using a combination of in silico techniques. Due to its large size and multiple domains, elucidation of the tertiary structure of the L protein has so far challenged both dry and wet laboratories. In this work, we leverage complementary perspectives and tools from the computational-molecular-biology and bioinformatics domains for constructing, refining, and evaluating several atomistic structural models of the L protein that are physically realistic. All computed models have very flexible termini of about 200 amino acids each, and a high proportion of helical regions. Properties such as potential energy, radius of gyration, hydrodynamics radius, flexibility coefficient, and solvent-accessible surface are reported. Structural characterization of the L protein enables our laboratories to better understand viral replication and transcription via further studies of L protein-mediated protein–protein interactions. While results presented a focus on the RVFV L protein, the following workflow is a more general modeling protocol for discovering the tertiary structure of multidomain proteins consisting of thousands of amino acids. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Selected Papers from the 11th Computational Structural Bioinformatics Workshop (CSBW-2018))

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19 pages, 5318 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Deep Learning for Validating and Estimating Resolution of Cryo-Electron Microscopy Density Maps ^†

by Todor Kirilov Avramov, Dan Vyenielo, Josue Gomez-Blanco, Swathi Adinarayanan, Javier Vargas and Dong Si

Molecules 2019, 24(6), 1181; https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules24061181 - 26 Mar 2019

Cited by 20 | Viewed by 6456

Abstract

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is becoming the imaging method of choice for determining protein structures. Many atomic structures have been resolved based on an exponentially growing number of published three-dimensional (3D) high resolution cryo-EM density maps. However, the resolution value claimed for the reconstructed 3D density map has been the topic of scientific debate for many years. The Fourier Shell Correlation (FSC) is the currently accepted cryo-EM resolution measure, but it can be subjective, manipulated, and has its own limitations. In this study, we first propose supervised deep learning methods to extract representative 3D features at high, medium and low resolutions from simulated protein density maps and build classification models that objectively validate resolutions of experimental 3D cryo-EM maps. Specifically, we build classification models based on dense artificial neural network (DNN) and 3D convolutional neural network (3D CNN) architectures. The trained models can classify a given 3D cryo-EM density map into one of three resolution levels: high, medium, low. The preliminary DNN and 3D CNN models achieved 92.73% accuracy and 99.75% accuracy on simulated test maps, respectively. Applying the DNN and 3D CNN models to thirty experimental cryo-EM maps achieved an agreement of 60.0% and 56.7%, respectively, with the author published resolution value of the density maps. We further augment these previous techniques and present preliminary results of a 3D U-Net model for local resolution classification. The model was trained to perform voxel-wise classification of 3D cryo-EM density maps into one of ten resolution classes, instead of a single global resolution value. The U-Net model achieved 88.3% and 94.7% accuracy when evaluated on experimental maps with local resolutions determined by MonoRes and ResMap methods, respectively. Our results suggest deep learning can potentially improve the resolution evaluation process of experimental cryo-EM maps. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Selected Papers from the 11th Computational Structural Bioinformatics Workshop (CSBW-2018))

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18 pages, 3169 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Investigating the Formation of Structural Elements in Proteins Using Local Sequence-Dependent Information and a Heuristic Search Algorithm

by Alejandro Estaña, Malik Ghallab, Pau Bernadó and Juan Cortés

Molecules 2019, 24(6), 1150; https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules24061150 - 22 Mar 2019

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2898

Abstract

Structural elements inserted in proteins are essential to define folding/unfolding mechanisms and partner recognition events governing signaling processes in living organisms. Here, we present an original approach to model the folding mechanism of these structural elements. Our approach is based on the exploitation of local, sequence-dependent structural information encoded in a database of three-residue fragments extracted from a large set of high-resolution experimentally determined protein structures. The computation of conformational transitions leading to the formation of the structural elements is formulated as a discrete path search problem using this database. To solve this problem, we propose a heuristically-guided depth-first search algorithm. The domain-dependent heuristic function aims at minimizing the length of the path in terms of angular distances, while maximizing the local density of the intermediate states, which is related to their probability of existence. We have applied the strategy to two small synthetic polypeptides mimicking two common structural motifs in proteins. The folding mechanisms extracted are very similar to those obtained when using traditional, computationally expensive approaches. These results show that the proposed approach, thanks to its simplicity and computational efficiency, is a promising research direction. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Selected Papers from the 11th Computational Structural Bioinformatics Workshop (CSBW-2018))

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13 pages, 1723 KiB

Open AccessArticle

APE-Gen: A Fast Method for Generating Ensembles of Bound Peptide-MHC Conformations

by Jayvee R. Abella, Dinler A. Antunes, Cecilia Clementi and Lydia E. Kavraki

Molecules 2019, 24(5), 881; https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules24050881 - 02 Mar 2019

Cited by 25 | Viewed by 4318

Abstract

The Class I Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) is a central protein in immunology as it binds to intracellular peptides and displays them at the cell surface for recognition by T-cells. The structural analysis of bound peptide-MHC complexes (pMHCs) holds the promise of interpretable and general binding prediction (i.e., testing whether a given peptide binds to a given MHC). However, structural analysis is limited in part by the difficulty in modelling pMHCs given the size and flexibility of the peptides that can be presented by MHCs. This article describes APE-Gen (Anchored Peptide-MHC Ensemble Generator), a fast method for generating ensembles of bound pMHC conformations. APE-Gen generates an ensemble of bound conformations by iterated rounds of (i) anchoring the ends of a given peptide near known pockets in the binding site of the MHC, (ii) sampling peptide backbone conformations with loop modelling, and then (iii) performing energy minimization to fix steric clashes, accumulating conformations at each round. APE-Gen takes only minutes on a standard desktop to generate tens of bound conformations, and we show the ability of APE-Gen to sample conformations found in X-ray crystallography even when only sequence information is used as input. APE-Gen has the potential to be useful for its scalability (i.e., modelling thousands of pMHCs or even non-canonical longer peptides) and for its use as a flexible search tool. We demonstrate an example for studying cross-reactivity. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Selected Papers from the 11th Computational Structural Bioinformatics Workshop (CSBW-2018))

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22 pages, 539 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Graph-Based Community Detection for Decoy Selection in Template-Free Protein Structure Prediction

by Kazi Lutful Kabir, Liban Hassan, Zahra Rajabi, Nasrin Akhter and Amarda Shehu

Molecules 2019, 24(5), 854; https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules24050854 - 28 Feb 2019

Cited by 9 | Viewed by 3954

Abstract

Significant efforts in wet and dry laboratories are devoted to resolving molecular structures. In particular, computational methods can now compute thousands of tertiary structures that populate the structure space of a protein molecule of interest. These advances are now allowing us to turn our attention to analysis methodologies that are able to organize the computed structures in order to highlight functionally relevant structural states. In this paper, we propose a methodology that leverages community detection methods, designed originally to detect communities in social networks, to organize computationally probed protein structure spaces. We report a principled comparison of such methods along several metrics on proteins of diverse folds and lengths. We present a rigorous evaluation in the context of decoy selection in template-free protein structure prediction. The results make the case that network-based community detection methods warrant further investigation to advance analysis of protein structure spaces for automated selection of functionally relevant structures. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Selected Papers from the 11th Computational Structural Bioinformatics Workshop (CSBW-2018))

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Review

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12 pages, 232 KiB

Open AccessReview

Computational Structural Biology: Successes, Future Directions, and Challenges

by Ruth Nussinov, Chung-Jung Tsai, Amarda Shehu and Hyunbum Jang

Molecules 2019, 24(3), 637; https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules24030637 - 12 Feb 2019

Cited by 17 | Viewed by 6046

Abstract

Computational biology has made powerful advances. Among these, trends in human health have been uncovered through heterogeneous ‘big data’ integration, and disease-associated genes were identified and classified. Along a different front, the dynamic organization of chromatin is being elucidated to gain insight into the fundamental question of genome regulation. Powerful conformational sampling methods have also been developed to yield a detailed molecular view of cellular processes. when combining these methods with the advancements in the modeling of supramolecular assemblies, including those at the membrane, we are finally able to get a glimpse into how cells’ actions are regulated. Perhaps most intriguingly, a major thrust is on to decipher the mystery of how the brain is coded. Here, we aim to provide a broad, yet concise, sketch of modern aspects of computational biology, with a special focus on computational structural biology. We attempt to forecast the areas that computational structural biology will embrace in the future and the challenges that it may face. We skirt details, highlight successes, note failures, and map directions. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Selected Papers from the 11th Computational Structural Bioinformatics Workshop (CSBW-2018))

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Selected Papers from the 11th Computational Structural Bioinformatics Workshop (CSBW-2018)

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