Cross α-Helical Nanotubes: Mining the Designability Landscape for Filamentous Peptide Nanomaterials

Abstract

scheme. However, this step is necessarily prone to error because of the prevalence of dissociated LC8 particles and because IDPs are not directly observed. Therefore, a statistical correction procedure was developed which synthetically replicates the EM micrography by 're-scattering' the assigned free LC8 proteins, and oligomers are reclassified for comparison with the original assignments. This procedure provides a statistical likelihood that a free LC8 artificially lengthens an oligomer assignment by random proximity, and the valency of the putative true-positive oligomer assignments are adjusted accordingly. The process is iterated until self-consistency is achieved with the original direct counts. Our results demonstrate that the automated analysis identifies a heterogeneous population distribution of oligomeric species that are consistent with manually analyzed data. Furthermore, the correction procedure provides a self-consistent picture of the underlying species distribution, not directly apparent from naïve analysis of the image dataset.