Characterization of life processes at the molecular level requires structural details of protein interactions. The number of experimentally determined structures of protein-protein complexes accounts only for a fraction of known protein interactions. This gap in structural description of the interactome has to be bridged by modeling. An essential part of the development of structural modeling/docking techniques for protein interactions is databases of protein-protein complexes. They are necessary for studying protein interfaces, providing a knowledge base for docking algorithms, and developing intermolecular potentials, search procedures, and scoring functions. Development of protein-protein docking techniques requires thorough benchmarking of different parts of the docking protocols on carefully curated sets of protein-protein complexes. We present a comprehensive description of the DOCKGROUND resource (http://dockground.compbio.ku. edu) for structural modeling of protein interactions, including previously unpublished unbound docking benchmark set 4, and the X-ray docking decoy set 2. The resource offers a variety of interconnected datasets of protein-protein complexes and other data for the development and testing of different aspects of protein docking methodologies. Based on protein-protein complexes extracted from the PDB biounit files, DOCKGROUND offers sets of X-ray unbound, simulated unbound, model, and docking decoy structures. All datasets are freely available for download, as a whole or selecting specific structures, through a user-friendly interface on one integrated website.

Targeted protein degradation (TPD) is a promising approach in drug discovery for degrading proteins implicated in diseases. A key step in this process is the formation of a ternary complex where a heterobifunctional molecule induces proximity of an E3 ligase to a protein of interest (POI), thus facilitating ubiquitin transfer to the POI. In this work, we characterize 3 steps in the TPD process. (1) We simulate the ternary complex formation of SMARCA2 bromodomain and VHL E3 ligase by combining hydrogen-deuterium exchange mass spectrometry with weighted ensemble molecular dynamics (MD). (2) We characterize the conformational heterogeneity of the ternary complex using Hamiltonian replica exchange simulations and small-angle X-ray scattering. (3) We assess the ubiquitination of the POI in the context of the full Cullin-RING Ligase, confirming experimental ubiquitinomics results. Differences in degradation efficiency can be explained by the proximity of lysine residues on the POI relative to ubiquitin.

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The paper presents analysis of our template-based and free docking predictions in the joint CASP12/CAPRI37 round. A new scoring function for template-based docking was developed, benchmarked on the Dockground resource, and applied to the targets. The results showed that the function successfully discriminates the incorrect docking predictions. In correctly predicted targets, the scoring function was complemented by other considerations, such as consistency of the oligomeric states among templates, similarity of the biological functions, biological interface relevance, etc. The scoring function still does not distinguish well biological from crystal packing interfaces, and needs further development for the docking of bundles of α-helices. In the case of the trimeric targets, sequence-based methods did not find common templates, despite similarity of the structures, suggesting complementary use of structure- and sequence-based alignments in comparative docking. The results showed that if a good docking template is found, an accurate model of the interface can be built even from largely inaccurate models of individual subunits. Free docking however is very sensitive to the quality of the individual models. However, our newly developed contact potential detected approximate locations of the binding sites.

Targeted protein degradation (TPD) has recently emerged as a powerful approach for removing (rather than inhibiting) proteins implicated in diseases. A key step in TPD is the formation of an induced proximity complex where a degrader molecule recruits an E3 ligase to the protein of interest (POI), facilitating the transfer of ubiquitin to the POI and initiating the proteasomal degradation process. Here, we address three critical aspects of the TPD process using atomistic simulations: 1) formation of the ternary complex induced by a degrader molecule, 2) conformational heterogeneity of the ternary complex, and 3) degradation efficiency via the full Cullin Ring Ligase (CRL) macromolecular assembly. The novel approach described here combines experimental biophysical data with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to accurately predict ternary complex structures at atomic resolution. We integrate hydrogen-deuterium exchange mass spectrometry (HDX-MS, which measures the solvent exposure of protein residues) directly into the MD simulation algorithm to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the ternary structure predictions of the bromodomain of the cancer target SMARCA2 with the E3 ligase VHL, as mediated by three different degrader molecules. The simulations accurately reproduce X-ray crystal structures--including a new structure that we determined in this work (PDB ID: 7S4E)--with root mean square deviations (RMSD) of 1.1 to 1.6 Å. The simulations also reveal a structural ensemble of low-energy conformations of the ternary complex. Snapshots from these simulations are used as seeds for additional simulations, where we perform 5.7 milliseconds of aggregate simulation time using Folding@home, the world's largest distributed supercomputer. The detailed free energy surface captures the crystal structure conformation within the low-energy basin and is consistent with solution-phase experimental data (HDX-MS and SAXS). Finally, we graft a structural ensemble of the ternary complexes onto the full CRL and perform enhanced sampling simulations. Our results suggest that differences in degradation efficiency may be related to the proximity distribution of lysine residues on the POI relative to the E2-loaded ubiquitin. We make source code and the simulation and experimental datasets from this work publicly available for researchers to further advance the field of induced proximity modulation.

Targeted protein degradation (TPD) has emerged as a powerful approach for removing (rather than inhibiting) proteins implicated in diseases. A key step in TPD is the formation of an induced proximity complex where a degrader molecule recruits an E3 ligase to the protein of interest (POI), facilitating the transfer of ubiquitin to the POI and initiating the proteasomal degradation process. Here, we address three critical aspects of the TPD process using atomistic simulations: 1) formation of the ternary complex induced by a degrader molecule, 2) conformational heterogeneity of the ternary complex, and 3) degradation efficiency via the full Cullin Ring Ligase (CRL) macromolecular assembly. The novel approach described here combines experimental biophysical data with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to accurately predict ternary complex structures at atomic resolution. We integrate hydrogen-deuterium exchange mass spectrometry (HDX-MS, which measures the solvent exposure of protein residues) with MD to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the ternary structure predictions of the bromodomain of the cancer target SMARCA2 with the E3 ligase VHL, as mediated by three different degrader molecules. The simulations accurately reproduce X-ray crystal structures -- including a new structure that we determined in this work (PDB ID: 7S4E) -- with root mean square deviations (RMSD) of 1.1 to 1.6 A. The simulations also reveal a structural ensemble of low-energy conformations of the ternary complex. Snapshots from these simulations are used as seeds for additional simulations, where we perform 7.1 milliseconds of aggregate simulation time using Folding@home. The detailed free energy surface captures the crystal structure conformation within a low-energy basin and is consistent with solution-phase experimental data (HDX-MS and SAXS). Finally, we graft a structural ensemble of the ternary complexes onto the full CRL and perform enhanced sampling simulations, which suggest that differences in degradation efficiency may be related to the proximity distribution of lysine residues on the POI relative to the E2-loaded ubiquitin.

Protein-protein docking procedures typically perform the global scan of the proteins relative positions, followed by the local refinement of the putative matches. Because of the size of the search space, the global scan is usually implemented as rigid-body search, using computationally inexpensive intermolecular energy approximations. An adequate refinement has to take into account structural flexibility. Since the refinement performs conformational search of the interacting proteins, it is extremely computationally challenging, given the enormous amount of the internal degrees of freedom. Different approaches limit the search space by restricting the search to the side chains, rotameric states, coarse-grained structure representation, principal normal modes, and so on. Still, even with the approximations, the refinement presents an extreme computational challenge due to the very large number of the remaining degrees of freedom. Given the complexity of the search space, the advantage of the exhaustive search is obvious. The obstacle to such search is computational feasibility. However, the growing computational power of modern computers, especially due to the increasing utilization of Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) with large amount of specialized computing cores, extends the ranges of applicability of the brute-force search methods. This proof-of-concept study demonstrates computational feasibility of an exhaustive search of side-chain conformations in protein pocking. The procedure, implemented on the GPU architecture, was used to generate the optimal conformations in a large representative set of protein-protein complexes. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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