Analysis of metal-protein interaction distances, coordination numbers, B-factors (displacement parameters), and occupancies of metal binding sites in protein structures determined by X-ray crystallography and deposited in the PDB shows many unusual values and unexpected correlations. By measuring the frequency of each amino acid in metal ion binding sites, the positive or negative preferences of each residue for each type of cation were identified. Our approach may be used for fast identification of metal-binding structural motifs that cannot be identified on the basis of sequence similarity alone. The analysis compares data derived separately from high and medium resolution structures from the PDB with those from very high resolution small-molecule structures in the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD). For high resolution protein structures, the distribution of metal-protein or metal-water interaction distances agrees quite well with data from CSD, but the distribution is unrealistically wide for medium (2.0 -2.5 Å) resolution data. Our analysis of cation B-factors versus average B-factors of atoms in the cation environment reveals substantial numbers of structures contain either an incorrect metal ion assignment or an unusual coordination pattern. Correlation between data resolution and completeness of the metal coordination spheres is also found.

A nonredundant set of 9081 protein crystal structures in the Protein Data Bank was used to examine the solvent content, the number of polypeptide chains, and the oligomeric states of proteins in crystals as a function of crystal symmetry (as classified by crystal systems and space groups). It was found that there is a correlation between solvent content and crystal symmetry. Surprisingly, proteins crystallizing in lower symmetry systems have lower solvent content compared to those crystallizing in higher symmetry systems. Nevertheless, there is no universal correlation between solvent content and preferences of macromolecules to crystallize in certain space groups. Crystal symmetry as a function of oligomeric state was examined, where trimers, tetramers, and hexamers were found to prefer to crystallize in systems where the oligomer symmetry could be incorporated in the crystal symmetry. Our analysis also shows that the frequency distribution within the enantiomorphous pairs of space groups does not differ significantly, in contrast to previous reports.Keywords: solvent content; Matthews coefficient; protein crystals; oligomerization; space group frequency Supplemental material: see www.proteinscience.orgWater plays an important role in the structure of biomolecules and often influences protein function. Water molecules not only affect protein folding, but also mediate biological processes such as enzymatic reactions and molecular recognition. Information about the fraction of water (solvent) plays a significant role in the X-ray structure determination process. First, knowledge of the solvent content helps to determine the number of molecules in the asymmetric unit (Matthews 1968), which is crucial in early stages of crystal structure determination. Second, an approximate value of solvent content is needed for significant phase improvement by solvent flattening methods (Wang 1985;Leslie 1987;Abrahams and Leslie 1996), which is necessary to resolve the inherent phase ambiguity in single anomalous diffraction (SAD) experiments. For both SAD and MAD (multiwavelength anomalous diffraction) (Hendrickson 1991;Hendrickson et al. 1990), phase improvement by solvent flattening is critical for low resolution data (Kirillova et al. 2007), especially when non-crystallographic symmetry cannot be applied.Matthews (1968) observed that the solvent content in protein crystals ranged from 27% to 65%, with an average of 43%. He also showed that the quantity V M (the Matthews coefficient, defined as the ratio of the volume of the asymmetric unit to the molecular weight of all