Abstract
The quaternary structure (QS) of a protein is determined by measuring its molecular weight in solution. The data have to be extracted from the literature, and they may be missing even for proteins that have a crystal structure reported in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). The PDB and other databases derived from it report QS information that either was obtained from the depositors or is based on an analysis of the contacts between polypeptide chains in the crystal, and this frequently differs from the QS determined in solution.
The QS of a protein can be predicted from its sequence using either homology or threading methods. However, a majority of the proteins with less than 30% sequence identity have different QSs. A model of the QS can also be derived by docking the subunits when their 3D structure is independently known, but the model is likely to be incorrect if large conformation changes take place when the oligomer assembles.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Darnall, D. W., Klotz, I. M. (1975) Subunit constitution of proteins: a table. Arch Biochem Biophys 166, 651–682.
Alberts, B. (1998) The cell as a collection of protein machines: preparing the next generation of molecular biologists. Cell 92, 291–294.
Goodsell, D. S., Olson, A. J. (2000) Structural symmetry and protein function. Annu Rev Biophys Biomol Struct 29, 105–153.
Berman, H. M., Westbrook, J., Feng, Z., Gilliland, G., Bhat, T. N., Weissig, H., Shindyalov, I. N., Bourne, P. E. (2000) The Protein Data Bank. Nucleic Acids Res 28, 235–242.
Ponstingl, H., Henrick, K., Thornton, J. M. (2000) Discriminating between homodimeric and monomeric proteins in the crystalline state. Proteins 41, 47–57.
Ponstingl, H., Kabir, T., Gorse, D., Thornton, J. M. (2005) Morphological aspects of oligomeric protein structures. Prog Biophys Mol Biol 89, 9–35.
Bahadur, R. P., Chakrabarti, P., Rodier, F., Janin, J. (2003) Dissecting subunit interfaces in homodimeric proteins. Proteins 53, 708–719.
Levy, E. D. (2007) PiQSi: protein quaternary structure investigation. Structure 15, 1364–1367.
Xu, Q., Canutescu, A., Obradovic, Z., Dunbrack, R. L., Jr. (2006) ProtBuD: a database of biological unit structures of protein families and superfamilies. Bioinformatics 22, 2876–2882.
Murzin, A. G., Brenner, S. E., Hubbard, T., Chothia, C. (1995) SCOP: a structural classification of proteins database for the investigation of sequences and structures. J Mol Biol 247, 536–540.
Levy, E. D., Pereira-Leal, J. B., Chothia, C., Teichmann, S. A. (2006) 3D complex: a structural classification of protein complexes. PLoS Comput Biol 2, e155.
Henrick, K., Thornton, J. M. (1998) PQS: a protein quaternary structure file server. Trends Biochem Sci 23, 358–361.
Ponstingl, H., Kabir, T., Thornton, J. M. (2003) Automatic inference of protein quaternary structure from crystals. J Appl Cryst 36, 1116–1122.
Krissinel, E., Henrick, K. (2007) Inference of macromolecular assemblies from crystalline state. J Mol Biol 372, 774–797.
Janin, J., Miller, S., Chothia, C. (1988) Surface, subunit interfaces and interior of oligomeric proteins. J Mol Biol 204, 155–164.
Garian, R. (2001) Prediction of quaternary structure from primary structure. Bioinformatics 17, 551–556.
Carugo, O. (2007) A structural proteomics filter: prediction of the quaternary structural type of hetero-oligomeric proteins on the basis of their sequences. J Appl Cryst 40, 986–989.
Aloy, P., Pichaud, M., Russell, R. B. (2005) Protein complexes: structure prediction challenges for the 21st century. Curr Opin Struct Biol 15, 15–22.
Aloy, P., Ceulemans, H., Stark, A., Russell, R. B. (2003) The relationship between sequence and interaction divergence in proteins. J Mol Biol 332, 989–998.
Levy, E. D., Erba, E. B., Robinson, C. V., Teichmann, S. A. Assembly reflects evolution of protein complexes (submitted)
Aloy, P., Russell, R. B. (2003) InterPreTS: protein interaction prediction through tertiary structure. Bioinformatics 19, 161–162
Finn, R. D., Marshall, M., Bateman, A. (2005) iPfam: visualization of protein-protein interactions in PDB at domain and amino acid resolutions. Bioinformatics 21, 410–412.
Stein, A., Russell, R. B., Aloy, P. (2005) 3did: interacting protein domains of known three-dimensional structure. Nucleic Acids Res 33, D413–D417.
Aloy, P., Böttcher, B., Ceulemans, H., Leutwein, C., Mellwig, C., Fischer, S., Gavin, A. C., Bork, P., Superti-Furga, G., Serrano, L., Russell, R. B. (2004) Structure-based assembly of protein complexes in yeast. Science 303, 2026–2029.
Grimm, V., Zhang, Y., Skolnick, J. (2006) Benchmarking of dimeric threading and structure refinement. Proteins 63, 457–465.
Chen, H., Skolnick, J. (2008) M-TASSER: An Algorithm for Protein Quaternary Structure Prediction. Biophys J 94, 918–928.
Zhang, Y., Skolnick, J. (2004) Automated structure prediction of weakly homologous proteins on a genomic scale. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 101, 7594–7599.
Smith, G. R., Sternberg, M. J. (2002) Prediction of protein-protein interactions by docking methods. Curr Opin Struct Biol 12, 28–35.
Halperin, I., Ma, B., Wolfson, H., Nussinov, R. (2002) Principles of docking: An overview of search algorithms and a guide to scoring functions. Proteins 47, 409–443.
Gray, J. (2006) High-resolution protein-protein docking. Curr Op Struct Biol 16, 150–169.
Méndez, R., Leplae, R., Lensink, M. F., Wodak, S. J. (2005) Assessment of CAPRI predictions in rounds 3–5 shows progress in docking procedures. Proteins 60, 150–169.
Lensink, M. F., Méndez, R., Wodak, S. J. (2007) Docking and scoring protein complexes: CAPRI 3rd Edition. Proteins 69, 704–718.
Wiehe, K., Peterson, M. W., Pierce, B., Mintseris, J., Weng, Z. (2007) Protein-protein docking: overview and performance analysis. Methods Mol Biol 413, 283–314.
May, A., Zacharias, M. (2007) Protein-protein docking in CAPRI using ATTRACT to account for global and local flexibility. Proteins 69, 774–780.
Wiehe, K., Pierce, B., Tong, W. W., Hwang, H., Mintseris, J., Weng, Z. (2007) The performance of ZDOCK and ZRANK in rounds 6–11 of CAPRI. Proteins 69, 719–725.
Mandell, J. G., Roberts, V. A., Pique, M. E., Kotlovyi, V., Mitchell, J. C., Nelson, E., Tsigelny, I., Ten Eyck, L. F. (2001) Protein docking using continuum electrostatics and geometric fit. Protein Eng 14, 105–113.
Gabb, H. A., Jackson, R. M., Sternberg, M. J. (1997) Modelling protein docking using shape complementarity, electrostatics and biochemical information. J Mol Biol 272, 106–120.
Tovchigrechko, A., Vakser, I. A. (2006) GRAMM-X public web server for protein-protein docking. Nucleic Acids Res 34, W310–W314.
Schneidman-Duhovny, D., Inbar, Y., Nussinov, R., Wolfson, H. J. (2005) PatchDock and SymmDock: servers for rigid and symmetric docking. Nucleic Acids Res 33, W363–W367.
Chaudhury, S., Sircar, A., Sivasubramanian, A., Berrondo, M., Gray, J. J. (2007) Incorporating biochemical information and backbone flexibility in RosettaDock for CAPRI rounds 6–12. Proteins 69, 793–800.
Wang, C., Schueler-Furman, O., Andre, I., London, N., Fleishman, S. J., Bradley, P., Qian, B., Baker, D. (2007) RosettaDock in CAPRI rounds 6–12. Proteins. 69, 758–763.
Heifetz, A., Pal, S., Smith, G. R. (2007) Protein-protein docking: progress in CAPRI rounds 6–12 using a combination of methods: the introduction of steered solvated molecular dynamics. Proteins 69, 816–822.
Qin, S., Zhou, H. X. (2007) A holistic approach to protein docking. Proteins 69, 743–749.
Dominguez, C., Boelens, R., Bonvin, A. M. (2003) HADDOCK: a protein-protein docking approach based on biochemical or biophysical information. J Am Chem Soc 125, 1731–1737.
de Vries, S. J., van Dijk, A. D., Krzeminski, M., van Dijk, M., Thureau, A., Hsu, V., Wassenaar, T., Bonvin, A. M. (2007) HADDOCK versus HADDOCK: new features and performance of HADDOCK2.0 on the CAPRI targets. Proteins 69, 726–733.
Krol, M., Chaleil, R. A., Tournier, A. L., Bates, P. A. (2007) Implicit flexibility in protein docking: cross-docking and local refinement. Proteins 69, 750–757.
Schneidman-Duhovny, D., Inbar, Y., Nussinov, R., Wolfson, H. J. (2005) Geometry-based flexible and symmetric protein docking. Proteins 60, 224–231.
Tovchigrechko, A., Wells, C. A., Vakser, I. A. (2002) Docking of protein models. Protein Sci 11, 1888–1896.
Alber, F., Dokudovskaya, S., Veenhoff, L. M., Zhang, W., Kipper, J., Devos, D., Suprapto, A., Karni-Schmidt, O., Williams, R., Chait, B. T., Sali, A., Rout, M. P. (2007) The molecular architecture of the nuclear pore complex. Nature 450, 695–701.
Berchanski, A., Segal, D., Eisenstein, M. (2005) Modeling oligomers with Cn or Dn symmetry: application to CAPRI target 10. Proteins 60, 202–206.
Pierce, B., Tong, W., Weng, Z. (2005) M-ZDOCK: a grid-based approach for Cn symmetric multimer docking. Bioinformatics 21, 1472–1478.
Inbar, Y., Benyamini, H., Nussinov, R., Wolfson, H. J. (2005) Prediction of multimolecular assemblies by multiple docking. J Mol Biol 349, 435–447.
Inbar, Y., Benyamini, H., Nussinov, R., Wolfson, H. J. (2005) Combinatorial docking approach for structure prediction of large proteins and multi-molecular assemblies. Phys Biol 2, S156–S165.
Janin, J., Henrick, K., Moult, J., Eyck, L. T., Sternberg, M. J., Vajda, S., Vakser, I., Wodak, S. J. (2003) Critical Assessment of PRedicted Interactions. CAPRI: a Critical Assessment of PRedicted Interactions. Proteins 52, 2–9.
Moult, J., Fidelis, K., Kryshtafovych, A., Rost, B., Hubbard, T., Tramontano, A. (2007) Critical assessment of methods of protein structure prediction-Round VII. Proteins 69 S8, 3–9.
Janin, J. (2005) The targets of CAPRI rounds 3–5. Proteins 60, 170–175.
Janin, J. (2007) The targets of CAPRI rounds 6–12. Proteins 69, 699–703.
Bressanelli, S., Stiasny, K., Allison, S. L., Stura, E. A., Duquerroy, S., Lescar, J., Heinz, F. X., Rey, F. A. (2004) Structure of a flavivirus envelope glycoprotein in its low-pH-induced membrane fusion conformation. EMBO J 23, 728–738.
van Dijk, A. D., de Vries, S. J., Dominguez, C., Chen, H., Zhou, H. X., Bonvin, A. M. (2005) Data-driven docking: HADDOCK’s adventures in CAPRI. Proteins 60, 232–238.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to E. Levy (Cambridge) for the figure and for communicating unpublished data. We acknowledge support of the 3D-Repertoire and SPINE2-Complexes programs of the European Union.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Humana Press, a part of Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
About this protocol
Cite this protocol
Poupon, A., Janin, J. (2010). Analysis and Prediction of Protein Quaternary Structure. In: Carugo, O., Eisenhaber, F. (eds) Data Mining Techniques for the Life Sciences. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 609. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-60327-241-4_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-60327-241-4_20
Published:
Publisher Name: Humana Press
Print ISBN: 978-1-60327-240-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-60327-241-4
eBook Packages: Springer Protocols