PLoS Computational Biology

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Updated: 8 years 17 weeks ago

Comparisons of Allergenic and Metazoan Parasite Proteins: Allergy the Price of Immunity

Thu, 10/29/2015 - 16:00

by Nidhi Tyagi, Edward J Farnell, Colin M Fitzsimmons, Stephanie Ryan, Edridah Tukahebwa, Rick M Maizels, David W Dunne, Janet M Thornton, Nicholas Furnham

Allergic reactions can be considered as maladaptive IgE immune responses towards environmental antigens. Intriguingly, these mechanisms are observed to be very similar to those implicated in the acquisition of an important degree of immunity against metazoan parasites (helminths and arthropods) in mammalian hosts. Based on the hypothesis that IgE-mediated immune responses evolved in mammals to provide extra protection against metazoan parasites rather than to cause allergy, we predict that the environmental allergens will share key properties with the metazoan parasite antigens that are specifically targeted by IgE in infected human populations. We seek to test this prediction by examining if significant similarity exists between molecular features of allergens and helminth proteins that induce an IgE response in the human host. By employing various computational approaches, 2712 unique protein molecules that are known IgE antigens were searched against a dataset of proteins from helminths and parasitic arthropods, resulting in a comprehensive list of 2445 parasite proteins that show significant similarity through sequence and structure with allergenic proteins. Nearly half of these parasite proteins from 31 species fall within the 10 most abundant allergenic protein domain families (EF-hand, Tropomyosin, CAP, Profilin, Lipocalin, Trypsin-like serine protease, Cupin, BetV1, Expansin and Prolamin). We identified epitopic-like regions in 206 parasite proteins and present the first example of a plant protein (BetV1) that is the commonest allergen in pollen in a worm, and confirming it as the target of IgE in schistosomiasis infected humans. The identification of significant similarity, inclusive of the epitopic regions, between allergens and helminth proteins against which IgE is an observed marker of protective immunity explains the ‘off-target’ effects of the IgE-mediated immune system in allergy. All these findings can impact the discovery and design of molecules used in immunotherapy of allergic conditions.
Categories: Journal Articles

Relating Cortical Atrophy in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy with Graph Diffusion-Based Network Models

Thu, 10/29/2015 - 16:00

by Farras Abdelnour, Susanne Mueller, Ashish Raj

Mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is characterized by stereotyped origination and spread pattern of epileptogenic activity, which is reflected in stereotyped topographic distribution of neuronal atrophy on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Both epileptogenic activity and atrophy spread appear to follow white matter connections. We model the networked spread of activity and atrophy in TLE from first principles via two simple first order network diffusion models. Atrophy distribution is modeled as a simple consequence of the propagation of epileptogenic activity in one model, and as a progressive degenerative process in the other. We show that the network models closely reproduce the regional volumetric gray matter atrophy distribution of two epilepsy cohorts: 29 TLE subjects with medial temporal sclerosis (TLE-MTS), and 50 TLE subjects with normal appearance on MRI (TLE-no). Statistical validation at the group level suggests high correlation with measured atrophy (R = 0.586 for TLE-MTS, R = 0.283 for TLE-no). We conclude that atrophy spread model out-performs the hyperactivity spread model. These results pave the way for future clinical application of the proposed model on individual patients, including estimating future spread of atrophy, identification of seizure onset zones and surgical planning.
Categories: Journal Articles

Structural Insights into Separase Architecture and Substrate Recognition through Computational Modelling of Caspase-Like and Death Domains

Thu, 10/29/2015 - 16:00

by Anja Winter, Ralf Schmid, Richard Bayliss

Separases are large proteins that mediate sister chromatid disjunction in all eukaryotes. They belong to clan CD of cysteine peptidases and contain a well-conserved C-terminal catalytic protease domain similar to caspases and gingipains. However, unlike other well-characterized groups of clan CD peptidases, there are no high-resolution structures of separases and the details of their regulation and substrate recognition are poorly understood. Here we undertook an in-depth bioinformatical analysis of separases from different species with respect to their similarity in amino acid sequence and protein fold in comparison to caspases, MALT-1 proteins (mucosa-associated lymphoidtissue lymphoma translocation protein 1) and gingipain-R. A comparative model of the single C-terminal caspase-like domain in separase from C. elegans suggests similar binding modes of substrate peptides between these protein subfamilies, and enables differences in substrate specificity of separase proteins to be rationalised. We also modelled a newly identified putative death domain, located N-terminal to the caspase-like domain. The surface features of this domain identify potential sites of protein-protein interactions. Notably, we identified a novel conserved region with the consensus sequence WWxxRxxLD predicted to be exposed on the surface of the death domain, which we termed the WR motif. We envisage that findings from our study will guide structural and functional studies of this important protein family.
Categories: Journal Articles

Predicting the Effect of Mutations on Protein-Protein Binding Interactions through Structure-Based Interface Profiles

Tue, 10/27/2015 - 16:00

by Jeffrey R. Brender, Yang Zhang

The formation of protein-protein complexes is essential for proteins to perform their physiological functions in the cell. Mutations that prevent the proper formation of the correct complexes can have serious consequences for the associated cellular processes. Since experimental determination of protein-protein binding affinity remains difficult when performed on a large scale, computational methods for predicting the consequences of mutations on binding affinity are highly desirable. We show that a scoring function based on interface structure profiles collected from analogous protein-protein interactions in the PDB is a powerful predictor of protein binding affinity changes upon mutation. As a standalone feature, the differences between the interface profile score of the mutant and wild-type proteins has an accuracy equivalent to the best all-atom potentials, despite being two orders of magnitude faster once the profile has been constructed. Due to its unique sensitivity in collecting the evolutionary profiles of analogous binding interactions and the high speed of calculation, the interface profile score has additional advantages as a complementary feature to combine with physics-based potentials for improving the accuracy of composite scoring approaches. By incorporating the sequence-derived and residue-level coarse-grained potentials with the interface structure profile score, a composite model was constructed through the random forest training, which generates a Pearson correlation coefficient >0.8 between the predicted and observed binding free-energy changes upon mutation. This accuracy is comparable to, or outperforms in most cases, the current best methods, but does not require high-resolution full-atomic models of the mutant structures. The binding interface profiling approach should find useful application in human-disease mutation recognition and protein interface design studies.
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A Virtual Mixture Approach to the Study of Multistate Equilibrium: Application to Constant pH Simulation in Explicit Water

Tue, 10/27/2015 - 16:00

by Xiongwu Wu, Bernard R. Brooks

Chemical and thermodynamic equilibrium of multiple states is a fundamental phenomenon in biology systems and has been the focus of many experimental and computational studies. This work presents a simulation method to directly study the equilibrium of multiple states. This method constructs a virtual mixture of multiple states (VMMS) to sample the conformational space of all chemical states simultaneously. The VMMS system consists of multiple subsystems, one for each state. The subsystem contains a solute and a solvent environment. The solute molecules in all subsystems share the same conformation but have their own solvent environments. Transition between states is implicated by the change of their molar fractions. Simulation of a VMMS system allows efficient calculation of relative free energies of all states, which in turn determine their equilibrium molar fractions. For systems with a large number of state transition sites, an implicit site approximation is introduced to minimize the cost of simulation. A direct application of the VMMS method is for constant pH simulation to study protonation equilibrium. Applying the VMMS method to a heptapeptide of 3 ionizable residues, we calculated the pKas of those residues both with all explicit states and with implicit sites and obtained consistent results. For mouse epidermal growth factor of 9 ionizable groups, our VMMS simulations with implicit sites produced pKas of all 9 ionizable groups and the results agree qualitatively with NMR measurement. This example demonstrates the VMMS method can be applied to systems of a large number of ionizable groups and the computational cost scales linearly with the number of ionizable groups. For one of the most challenging systems in constant pH calculation, SNase Δ+PHS/V66K, our VMMS simulation shows that it is the state-dependent water penetration that causes the large deviation in lysine66’s pKa.
Categories: Journal Articles

Exposing Hidden Alternative Backbone Conformations in X-ray Crystallography Using qFit

Tue, 10/27/2015 - 16:00

by Daniel A. Keedy, James S. Fraser, Henry van den Bedem

Proteins must move between different conformations of their native ensemble to perform their functions. Crystal structures obtained from high-resolution X-ray diffraction data reflect this heterogeneity as a spatial and temporal conformational average. Although movement between natively populated alternative conformations can be critical for characterizing molecular mechanisms, it is challenging to identify these conformations within electron density maps. Alternative side chain conformations are generally well separated into distinct rotameric conformations, but alternative backbone conformations can overlap at several atomic positions. Our model building program qFit uses mixed integer quadratic programming (MIQP) to evaluate an extremely large number of combinations of sidechain conformers and backbone fragments to locally explain the electron density. Here, we describe two major modeling enhancements to qFit: peptide flips and alternative glycine conformations. We find that peptide flips fall into four stereotypical clusters and are enriched in glycine residues at the n+1 position. The potential for insights uncovered by new peptide flips and glycine conformations is exemplified by HIV protease, where different inhibitors are associated with peptide flips in the “flap” regions adjacent to the inhibitor binding site. Our results paint a picture of peptide flips as conformational switches, often enabled by glycine flexibility, that result in dramatic local rearrangements. Our results furthermore demonstrate the power of large-scale computational analysis to provide new insights into conformational heterogeneity. Overall, improved modeling of backbone heterogeneity with high-resolution X-ray data will connect dynamics to the structure-function relationship and help drive new design strategies for inhibitors of biomedically important systems.
Categories: Journal Articles

Multi-scale Visualization of Molecular Architecture Using Real-Time Ambient Occlusion in Sculptor

Tue, 10/27/2015 - 16:00

by Manuel Wahle, Willy Wriggers

The modeling of large biomolecular assemblies relies on an efficient rendering of their hierarchical architecture across a wide range of spatial level of detail. We describe a paradigm shift currently under way in computer graphics towards the use of more realistic global illumination models, and we apply the so-called ambient occlusion approach to our open-source multi-scale modeling program, Sculptor. While there are many other higher quality global illumination approaches going all the way up to full GPU-accelerated ray tracing, they do not provide size-specificity of the features they shade. Ambient occlusion is an aspect of global lighting that offers great visual benefits and powerful user customization. By estimating how other molecular shape features affect the reception of light at some surface point, it effectively simulates indirect shadowing. This effect occurs between molecular surfaces that are close to each other, or in pockets such as protein or ligand binding sites. By adding ambient occlusion, large macromolecular systems look much more natural, and the perception of characteristic surface features is strongly enhanced. In this work, we present a real-time implementation of screen space ambient occlusion that delivers realistic cues about tunable spatial scale characteristics of macromolecular architecture. Heretofore, the visualization of large biomolecular systems, comprising e.g. hundreds of thousands of atoms or Mega-Dalton size electron microscopy maps, did not take into account the length scales of interest or the spatial resolution of the data. Our approach has been uniquely customized with shading that is tuned for pockets and cavities of a user-defined size, making it useful for visualizing molecular features at multiple scales of interest. This is a feature that none of the conventional ambient occlusion approaches provide. Actual Sculptor screen shots illustrate how our implementation supports the size-dependent rendering of molecular surface features.
Categories: Journal Articles

Broad CTL Response in Early HIV Infection Drives Multiple Concurrent CTL Escapes

Tue, 10/27/2015 - 16:00

by Sivan Leviyang, Vitaly V. Ganusov

Recent studies have highlighted the ability of HIV to escape from cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) responses that concurrently target multiple viral epitopes. Yet, the viral dynamics involved in such escape are incompletely understood. Previous analyses have made several strong assumptions regarding HIV escape from CTL responses such as independent or non-concurrent escape from individual CTL responses. Using experimental data from evolution of HIV half genomes in four patients we observe concurrent viral escape from multiple CTL responses during early infection (first 100 days of infection), providing confirmation of a recent result found in a study of one HIV-infected patient. We show that current methods of estimating CTL escape rates, based on the assumption of independent escapes, are biased and perform poorly when CTL escape proceeds concurrently at multiple epitopes. We propose a new method for analyzing longitudinal sequence data to estimate the rate of CTL escape across multiple epitopes; this method involves few parameters and performs well in simulation studies. By applying our novel method to experimental data, we find that concurrent multiple escapes occur at rates between 0.03 and 0.4 day−1, a relatively broad range that reflects uncertainty due to sparse sampling and wide ranges of parameter values. However, we show that concurrent escape at rates 0.1–0.2 day−1 across multiple epitopes is consistent with our patient datasets.
Categories: Journal Articles

DynaFace: Discrimination between Obligatory and Non-obligatory Protein-Protein Interactions Based on the Complex’s Dynamics

Tue, 10/27/2015 - 16:00

by Seren Soner, Pemra Ozbek, Jose Ignacio Garzon, Nir Ben-Tal, Turkan Haliloglu

Protein-protein interfaces have been evolutionarily-designed to enable transduction between the interacting proteins. Thus, we hypothesize that analysis of the dynamics of the complex can reveal details about the nature of the interaction, and in particular whether it is obligatory, i.e., persists throughout the entire lifetime of the proteins, or not. Indeed, normal mode analysis, using the Gaussian network model, shows that for the most part obligatory and non-obligatory complexes differ in their decomposition into dynamic domains, i.e., the mobile elements of the protein complex. The dynamic domains of obligatory complexes often mix segments from the interacting chains, and the hinges between them do not overlap with the interface between the chains. In contrast, in non-obligatory complexes the interface often hinges between dynamic domains, held together through few anchor residues on one side of the interface that interact with their counterpart grooves in the other end. In automatic analysis, 117 of 139 obligatory (84.2%) and 203 of 246 non-obligatory (82.5%) complexes are correctly classified by our method: DynaFace. We further use DynaFace to predict obligatory and non-obligatory interactions among a set of 300 putative protein complexes. DynaFace is available at: http://safir.prc.boun.edu.tr/dynaface.
Categories: Journal Articles

pMD-Membrane: A Method for Ligand Binding Site Identification in Membrane-Bound Proteins

Tue, 10/27/2015 - 16:00

by Priyanka Prakash, Abdallah Sayyed-Ahmad, Alemayehu A. Gorfe

Probe-based or mixed solvent molecular dynamics simulation is a useful approach for the identification and characterization of druggable sites in drug targets. However, thus far the method has been applied only to soluble proteins. A major reason for this is the potential effect of the probe molecules on membrane structure. We have developed a technique to overcome this limitation that entails modification of force field parameters to reduce a few pairwise non-bonded interactions between selected atoms of the probe molecules and bilayer lipids. We used the resulting technique, termed pMD-membrane, to identify allosteric ligand binding sites on the G12D and G13D oncogenic mutants of the K-Ras protein bound to a negatively charged lipid bilayer. In addition, we show that differences in probe occupancy can be used to quantify changes in the accessibility of druggable sites due to conformational changes induced by membrane binding or mutation.
Categories: Journal Articles

ENCORE: Software for Quantitative Ensemble Comparison

Tue, 10/27/2015 - 16:00

by Matteo Tiberti, Elena Papaleo, Tone Bengtsen, Wouter Boomsma, Kresten Lindorff-Larsen

There is increasing evidence that protein dynamics and conformational changes can play an important role in modulating biological function. As a result, experimental and computational methods are being developed, often synergistically, to study the dynamical heterogeneity of a protein or other macromolecules in solution. Thus, methods such as molecular dynamics simulations or ensemble refinement approaches have provided conformational ensembles that can be used to understand protein function and biophysics. These developments have in turn created a need for algorithms and software that can be used to compare structural ensembles in the same way as the root-mean-square-deviation is often used to compare static structures. Although a few such approaches have been proposed, these can be difficult to implement efficiently, hindering a broader applications and further developments. Here, we present an easily accessible software toolkit, called ENCORE, which can be used to compare conformational ensembles generated either from simulations alone or synergistically with experiments. ENCORE implements three previously described methods for ensemble comparison, that each can be used to quantify the similarity between conformational ensembles by estimating the overlap between the probability distributions that underlie them. We demonstrate the kinds of insights that can be obtained by providing examples of three typical use-cases: comparing ensembles generated with different molecular force fields, assessing convergence in molecular simulations, and calculating differences and similarities in structural ensembles refined with various sources of experimental data. We also demonstrate efficient computational scaling for typical analyses, and robustness against both the size and sampling of the ensembles. ENCORE is freely available and extendable, integrates with the established MDAnalysis software package, reads ensemble data in many common formats, and can work with large trajectory files.
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Parsimonious Model of Vascular Patterning Links Transverse Hormone Fluxes to Lateral Root Initiation: Auxin Leads the Way, while Cytokinin Levels Out

Tue, 10/27/2015 - 16:00

by Sedeer el-Showk, Hanna Help-Rinta-Rahko, Tiina Blomster, Riccardo Siligato, Athanasius F. M. Marée, Ari Pekka Mähönen, Verônica A. Grieneisen

An auxin maximum is positioned along the xylem axis of the Arabidopsis root tip. The pattern depends on mutual feedback between auxin and cytokinins mediated by the PIN class of auxin efflux transporters and AHP6, an inhibitor of cytokinin signalling. This interaction has been proposed to regulate the size and the position of the hormones’ respective signalling domains and specify distinct boundaries between them. To understand the dynamics of this regulatory network, we implemented a parsimonious computational model of auxin transport that considers hormonal regulation of the auxin transporters within a spatial context, explicitly taking into account cell shape and polarity and the presence of cell walls. Our analysis reveals that an informative spatial pattern in cytokinin levels generated by diffusion is a theoretically unlikely scenario. Furthermore, our model shows that such a pattern is not required for correct and robust auxin patterning. Instead, auxin-dependent modifications of cytokinin response, rather than variations in cytokinin levels, allow for the necessary feedbacks, which can amplify and stabilise the auxin maximum. Our simulations demonstrate the importance of hormonal regulation of auxin efflux for pattern robustness. While involvement of the PIN proteins in vascular patterning is well established, we predict and experimentally verify a role of AUX1 and LAX1/2 auxin influx transporters in this process. Furthermore, we show that polar localisation of PIN1 generates an auxin flux circuit that not only stabilises the accumulation of auxin within the xylem axis, but also provides a mechanism for auxin to accumulate specifically in the xylem-pole pericycle cells, an important early step in lateral root initiation. The model also revealed that pericycle cells on opposite xylem poles compete for auxin accumulation, consistent with the observation that lateral roots are not initiated opposite to each other.
Categories: Journal Articles

Multiscale Estimation of Binding Kinetics Using Brownian Dynamics, Molecular Dynamics and Milestoning

Tue, 10/27/2015 - 16:00

by Lane W. Votapka, Rommie E. Amaro

The kinetic rate constants of binding were estimated for four biochemically relevant molecular systems by a method that uses milestoning theory to combine Brownian dynamics simulations with more detailed molecular dynamics simulations. The rate constants found using this method agreed well with experimentally and theoretically obtained values. We predicted the association rate of a small charged molecule toward both a charged and an uncharged spherical receptor and verified the estimated value with Smoluchowski theory. We also calculated the kon rate constant for superoxide dismutase with its natural substrate, O2−, in a validation of a previous experiment using similar methods but with a number of important improvements. We also calculated the kon for a new system: the N-terminal domain of Troponin C with its natural substrate Ca2+. The kon calculated for the latter two systems closely resemble experimentally obtained values. This novel multiscale approach is computationally cheaper and more parallelizable when compared to other methods of similar accuracy. We anticipate that this methodology will be useful for predicting kinetic rate constants and for understanding the process of binding between a small molecule and a protein receptor.
Categories: Journal Articles

Conformational Dynamics and Binding Free Energies of Inhibitors of BACE-1: From the Perspective of Protonation Equilibria

Tue, 10/27/2015 - 16:00

by M. Olivia Kim, Patrick G. Blachly, J. Andrew McCammon

BACE-1 is the β-secretase responsible for the initial amyloidogenesis in Alzheimer’s disease, catalyzing hydrolytic cleavage of substrate in a pH-sensitive manner. The catalytic mechanism of BACE-1 requires water-mediated proton transfer from aspartyl dyad to the substrate, as well as structural flexibility in the flap region. Thus, the coupling of protonation and conformational equilibria is essential to a full in silico characterization of BACE-1. In this work, we perform constant pH replica exchange molecular dynamics simulations on both apo BACE-1 and five BACE-1-inhibitor complexes to examine the effect of pH on dynamics and inhibitor binding properties of BACE-1. In our simulations, we find that solution pH controls the conformational flexibility of apo BACE-1, whereas bound inhibitors largely limit the motions of the holo enzyme at all levels of pH. The microscopic pKa values of titratable residues in BACE-1 including its aspartyl dyad are computed and compared between apo and inhibitor-bound states. Changes in protonation between the apo and holo forms suggest a thermodynamic linkage between binding of inhibitors and protons localized at the dyad. Utilizing our recently developed computational protocol applying the binding polynomial formalism to the constant pH molecular dynamics (CpHMD) framework, we are able to obtain the pH-dependent binding free energy profiles for various BACE-1-inhibitor complexes. Our results highlight the importance of correctly addressing the binding-induced protonation changes in protein-ligand systems where binding accompanies a net proton transfer. This work comprises the first application of our CpHMD-based free energy computational method to protein-ligand complexes and illustrates the value of CpHMD as an all-purpose tool for obtaining pH-dependent dynamics and binding free energies of biological systems.
Categories: Journal Articles

ApoE4-specific Misfolded Intermediate Identified by Molecular Dynamics Simulations

Tue, 10/27/2015 - 16:00

by Benfeard Williams II, Marino Convertino, Jhuma Das, Nikolay V. Dokholyan

The increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is associated with the APOE gene, which encodes for three variants of Apolipoprotein E, namely E2, E3, E4, differing only by two amino acids at positions 112 and 158. ApoE4 is known to be the strongest risk factor for AD onset, while ApoE3 and ApoE2 are considered to be the AD-neutral and AD-protective isoforms, respectively. It has been hypothesized that the ApoE isoforms may contribute to the development of AD by modifying the homeostasis of ApoE physiological partners and AD-related proteins in an isoform-specific fashion. Here we find that, despite the high sequence similarity among the three ApoE variants, only ApoE4 exhibits a misfolded intermediate state characterized by isoform-specific domain-domain interactions in molecular dynamics simulations. The existence of an ApoE4-specific intermediate state can contribute to the onset of AD by altering multiple cellular pathways involved in ApoE-dependent lipid transport efficiency or in AD-related protein aggregation and clearance. We present what we believe to be the first structural model of an ApoE4 misfolded intermediate state, which may serve to elucidate the molecular mechanism underlying the role of ApoE4 in AD pathogenesis. The knowledge of the structure for the ApoE4 folding intermediate provides a new platform for the rational design of alternative therapeutic strategies to fight AD.
Categories: Journal Articles

Structural Refinement of Proteins by Restrained Molecular Dynamics Simulations with Non-interacting Molecular Fragments

Tue, 10/27/2015 - 16:00

by Rong Shen, Wei Han, Giacomo Fiorin, Shahidul M. Islam, Klaus Schulten, Benoît Roux

The knowledge of multiple conformational states is a prerequisite to understand the function of membrane transport proteins. Unfortunately, the determination of detailed atomic structures for all these functionally important conformational states with conventional high-resolution approaches is often difficult and unsuccessful. In some cases, biophysical and biochemical approaches can provide important complementary structural information that can be exploited with the help of advanced computational methods to derive structural models of specific conformational states. In particular, functional and spectroscopic measurements in combination with site-directed mutations constitute one important source of information to obtain these mixed-resolution structural models. A very common problem with this strategy, however, is the difficulty to simultaneously integrate all the information from multiple independent experiments involving different mutations or chemical labels to derive a unique structural model consistent with the data. To resolve this issue, a novel restrained molecular dynamics structural refinement method is developed to simultaneously incorporate multiple experimentally determined constraints (e.g., engineered metal bridges or spin-labels), each treated as an individual molecular fragment with all atomic details. The internal structure of each of the molecular fragments is treated realistically, while there is no interaction between different molecular fragments to avoid unphysical steric clashes. The information from all the molecular fragments is exploited simultaneously to constrain the backbone to refine a three-dimensional model of the conformational state of the protein. The method is illustrated by refining the structure of the voltage-sensing domain (VSD) of the Kv1.2 potassium channel in the resting state and by exploring the distance histograms between spin-labels attached to T4 lysozyme. The resulting VSD structures are in good agreement with the consensus model of the resting state VSD and the spin-spin distance histograms from ESR/DEER experiments on T4 lysozyme are accurately reproduced.
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Mapping the Protein Fold Universe Using the CamTube Force Field in Molecular Dynamics Simulations

Tue, 10/27/2015 - 16:00

by Predrag Kukic, Arvind Kannan, Maurits J. J. Dijkstra, Sanne Abeln, Carlo Camilloni, Michele Vendruscolo

It has been recently shown that the coarse-graining of the structures of polypeptide chains as self-avoiding tubes can provide an effective representation of the conformational space of proteins. In order to fully exploit the opportunities offered by such a ‘tube model’ approach, we present here a strategy to combine it with molecular dynamics simulations. This strategy is based on the incorporation of the ‘CamTube’ force field into the Gromacs molecular dynamics package. By considering the case of a 60-residue polyvaline chain, we show that CamTube molecular dynamics simulations can comprehensively explore the conformational space of proteins. We obtain this result by a 20 μs metadynamics simulation of the polyvaline chain that recapitulates the currently known protein fold universe. We further show that, if residue-specific interaction potentials are added to the CamTube force field, it is possible to fold a protein into a topology close to that of its native state. These results illustrate how the CamTube force field can be used to explore efficiently the universe of protein folds with good accuracy and very limited computational cost.
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Sensorimotor Model of Obstacle Avoidance in Echolocating Bats

Mon, 10/26/2015 - 16:00

by Dieter Vanderelst, Marc W. Holderied, Herbert Peremans

Bat echolocation is an ability consisting of many subtasks such as navigation, prey detection and object recognition. Understanding the echolocation capabilities of bats comes down to isolating the minimal set of acoustic cues needed to complete each task. For some tasks, the minimal cues have already been identified. However, while a number of possible cues have been suggested, little is known about the minimal cues supporting obstacle avoidance in echolocating bats. In this paper, we propose that the Interaural Intensity Difference (IID) and travel time of the first millisecond of the echo train are sufficient cues for obstacle avoidance. We describe a simple control algorithm based on the use of these cues in combination with alternating ear positions modeled after the constant frequency bat Rhinolophus rouxii. Using spatial simulations (2D and 3D), we show that simple phonotaxis can steer a bat clear from obstacles without performing a reconstruction of the 3D layout of the scene. As such, this paper presents the first computationally explicit explanation for obstacle avoidance validated in complex simulated environments. Based on additional simulations modelling the FM bat Phyllostomus discolor, we conjecture that the proposed cues can be exploited by constant frequency (CF) bats and frequency modulated (FM) bats alike. We hypothesize that using a low level yet robust cue for obstacle avoidance allows bats to comply with the hard real-time constraints of this basic behaviour.
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Modeling the Evolution of Beliefs Using an Attentional Focus Mechanism

Fri, 10/23/2015 - 16:00

by Dimitrije Marković, Jan Gläscher, Peter Bossaerts, John O’Doherty, Stefan J. Kiebel

For making decisions in everyday life we often have first to infer the set of environmental features that are relevant for the current task. Here we investigated the computational mechanisms underlying the evolution of beliefs about the relevance of environmental features in a dynamical and noisy environment. For this purpose we designed a probabilistic Wisconsin card sorting task (WCST) with belief solicitation, in which subjects were presented with stimuli composed of multiple visual features. At each moment in time a particular feature was relevant for obtaining reward, and participants had to infer which feature was relevant and report their beliefs accordingly. To test the hypothesis that attentional focus modulates the belief update process, we derived and fitted several probabilistic and non-probabilistic behavioral models, which either incorporate a dynamical model of attentional focus, in the form of a hierarchical winner-take-all neuronal network, or a diffusive model, without attention-like features. We used Bayesian model selection to identify the most likely generative model of subjects’ behavior and found that attention-like features in the behavioral model are essential for explaining subjects’ responses. Furthermore, we demonstrate a method for integrating both connectionist and Bayesian models of decision making within a single framework that allowed us to infer hidden belief processes of human subjects.
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