Nat. Commun. 2018
Automated structure determination using 4D-CHAINS/autoNOE-Rosetta. (a) Logo of 4D-CHAINS algorithm depicting its powerfulness. Chains squeeze the NMR spectrometer to unleash high-quality structures by using a minimal set of 4D spectra and fully automated data analysis. (b) 4D-CHAINS utilizes two complementary experimental datasets, a 4D-TOCSY and a 4D-NOESY, to yield correct assignments for at least 95% of residues and an error rate of less than 1.5% (middle bar; TOCSY-NOESY). (c-d) Performance of different 4D-CHAINS assignment scenarios for a 20 kDa protein structure, α-lytic protease, calculated using autoNOE-Rosetta. (c) Goodness of structure ensembles is measured using the Rosetta all-atom energy function, backbone heavy atom RMSD to X-ray structure and degree of structural convergence. (d) Lowest-energy structures in each ensemble colored as the points in (c) superimposed on the X-ray reference structure (gray).
Konstantinos Tripsianes Research Group
Significance
The automation of NMR structure determination remains a significant bottleneck towards increasing the throughput and accessibility of NMR as a structural biology tool to study proteins. The chief barrier currently is that obtaining NMR assignments at sufficient levels of completeness to accurately define the structures by conventional methods requires a significant amount of spectrometer time (several weeks), and effort by a trained expert (up to several months). Here, we describe 4D-CHAINS/autoNOE-Rosetta, a complete pipeline for NOE-driven structure determination of medium- to larger-sized proteins. The 4D-CHAINS algorithm analyzes two 4D spectra in an iterative ansatz where common NOEs between different spin systems supplement conventional through-bond connectivities to establish assignments of sidechain and backbone resonances at high levels of completeness and with a minimum error rate. The 4D-CHAINS assignments are then used to guide automated assignment of long-range NOEs and structure refinement in autoNOE-Rosetta. Our results on four targets ranging in size from 15.5 to 27.3 kDa illustrate that the NMR structures of proteins can be determined accurately and in an unsupervised manner in a matter of days.
4D-CHAINS software is free for non-commercial usage and can be downloaded from https://github.com/tevang/4D-CHAINS
Evangelidis, T. et al. Automated NMR resonance assignments and structure determination using a minimal set of 4D spectra. Nature Communications 9, 13, doi:10.1038/s41467-017-02592-z (2018).