A 16S rRNA gene database (http://greengenes.lbl.gov) addresses limitations of public repositories by providing chimera screening, standard alignment, and taxonomic classification using multiple published taxonomies. It was found that there is incongruent taxonomic nomenclature among curators even at the phylum level. Putative chimeras were identified in 3% of environmental sequences and in 0.2% of records derived from isolates. Environmental sequences were classified into 100 phylum-level lineages in the Archaea and Bacteria.

We present the newest version of the GROningen MOlecular Simulation program package, GROMOS96. GROMOS96 has been developed for the dynamic modelling of (bio)molecules using the methods of molecular dynamics, stochastic dynamics, and energy minimization as well as the path-integral formalism. An overview of its functionality is given, highlighting methodology not present in the last major release, GROMOS87. The organization of the code is outlined, and reliability, testing, and efficiency issues involved in the design of this large (73 000 lines of FORTRAN77 code) and complex package are discussed. Finally, we present two applications illustrating new functionality: local elevation simulation and molecular dynamics in four spatial dimensions.

Bellerophon is available as an interactive web server at http://foo.maths.uq.edu.au/~huber/bellerophon.pl

The concept of memory has been introduced into a molecular dynamics algorithm. This was done so as to persuade a molecular system to visit new areas of conformational space rather than be confined to a small number of low-energy regions. The method is demonstrated on a simple model system and the 11-residue cyclic peptide cyclosporin A. For comparison, calculations were also performed using simulated temperature annealing and a potential energy annealing scheme. Although the method can only be applied to systems with a small number of degrees of freedom, it offers the chance to generate a multitude of different low-energy structures, where other methods only give a single one or few. This is clearly important in problems such as drug design, where one is interested in the conformational spread of a system.

The Rosetta software suite for macromolecular modeling, docking, and design is widely used in pharmaceutical, industrial, academic, non-profit, and government laboratories. Despite its broad modeling capabilities, Rosetta remains consistently among leading software suites when compared to other methods created for highly specialized protein modeling and design tasks. Developed for over two decades by a global community of over 60 laboratories, Rosetta has undergone multiple refactorings, and now comprises over three million lines of code. Here we discuss methods developed in the last five years in Rosetta, involving the latest protocols for structure prediction; protein-protein and protein-small molecule docking; protein structure and interface design; loop modeling; the incorporation of various types of experimental data; modeling of peptides, antibodies and proteins in the immune system, nucleic acids, non-standard chemistries, carbohydrates, and membrane proteins. We briefly discuss improvements to the energy function, user interfaces, and usability of the software. Rosetta is available at www.rosettacommons.org.

Pseudocontact shift (PCS) effects induced by a paramagnetic lanthanide bound to a protein have become increasingly popular in NMR spectroscopy as they yield a complementary set of orientational and long-range structural restraints. PCS are a manifestation of the chi-tensor anisotropy, the Deltachi-tensor, which in turn can be determined from the PCS. Once the Deltachi-tensor has been determined, PCS become powerful long-range restraints for the study of protein structure and protein-ligand complexes. Here we present the newly developed package Numbat (New User-friendly Method Built for Automatic Deltachi-Tensor determination). With a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that allows a high degree of interactivity, Numbat is specifically designed for the computation of the complete set of Deltachi-tensor parameters (including shape, location and orientation with respect to the protein) from a set of experimentally measured PCS and the protein structure coordinates. Use of the program for Linux and Windows operating systems is illustrated by building a model of the complex between the E. coli DNA polymerase III subunits epsilon186 and theta using PCS.

Methods for measuring nanometer-scale distances between specific sites in proteins are essential for analysis of their structure and function. In this work we introduce Gd3+ spin labeling for nanometer-range distance measurements in proteins by high-field pulse electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR). To evaluate the performance of such measurements, we carried out four-pulse double-electron electron resonance (DEER) measurements on two proteins, p75ICD and τC14, labeled at strategically selected sites with either two nitroxides or two Gd3+ spin labels. In analogy to conventional site-directed spin labeling using nitroxides, Gd3+ tags that are derivatives of dipicolinic acid were covalently attached to cysteine thiol groups. Measurements were carried out on X-band (∼9.5 GHz, 0.35 T) and W-band (95 GHz, 3.5 T) spectrometers for the nitroxide-labeled proteins and at W-band for the Gd3+-labeled proteins. In the protein p75ICD, the orientations of the two nitroxides were found to be practically uncorrelated, and therefore the distance distribution could as readily be obtained at W-band as at X-band. The measured Gd3+−Gd3+ distance distribution had a maximum at 2.9 nm, as compared to 2.5 nm for the nitroxides. In the protein τC14, however, the orientations of the nitroxides were correlated, and the W-band measurements exhibited strong orientation selection that prevented a straightforward extraction of the distance distribution. The X-band measurements gave a nitroxide−nitroxide distance distribution with a maximum at 2.5 nm, and the W-band measurements gave a Gd3+−Gd3+ distance distribution with a maximum at 3.4 nm. The Gd3+−Gd3+ distance distributions obtained are in good agreement with expectations from structural models that take into account the flexibility of the tags and their tethers to the cysteine residues. These results show that Gd3+ labeling is a viable technique for distance measurements at high fields that features an order of magnitude sensitivity improvement, in terms of protein quantity, over X-band pulse EPR measurements using nitroxide spin labels. Its advantage over W-band distance measurements using nitroxides stems from an intrinsic absence of orientation selection.

Structural studies of proteins and protein-ligand complexes by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy can be greatly enhanced by site-specific attachment of lanthanide ions to create paramagnetic centers. In particular, pseudocontact shifts (PCS) generated by paramagnetic lanthanides contain important and unique long-range structure information. Here, we present a high-affinity lanthanide binding tag that can be attached to single cysteine residues of proteins. The new tag has many advantageous features that are not available in this combination from previously published tags: (i) it binds lanthanide ions very tightly, minimizing the generation of nonspecific effects, (ii) it produces PCSs with high reliability as its bulkiness prevents complete motional averaging of PCSs, (iii) it can be attached to single cysteine residues, alleviating the need of detailed prior knowledge of the 3D structure of the target protein, and (iv) it does not display conformational exchange phenomena that would increase the number of signals in the NMR spectrum. The performance of the tag is demonstrated with the N-terminal domain of the E. coli arginine repressor and the A28C mutant of human ubiquitin.