CABS-NMR - De novo tool for rapid global fold determination from chemical shifts, residual dipolar couplings and sparse methyl-methyl noes

Recent development of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques provided new types of structural restraints that can be successfully used in fast and low-cost global protein fold determination. Here, we present CABS-NMR, an efficient protein modeling tool, which takes advantage of such structural restraints. The restraints are converted from original NMR data to fit the coarse grained protein representation of the C-Alpha-Beta-Side-group (CABS) algorithm. CABS is a Monte Carlo search algorithm that uses a knowledge-based force field. Its versatile structure enables a variety of protein-modeling protocols, including purely de novo folding, folding guided by restraints derived from template structures or, structure assembly based on experimental data. In particular, CABS-NMR uses the distance and angular restraints set derived from various NMR experiments. This new modeling technique was successfully tested in structure determination of 10 globular proteins of size up to 216 residues, for which sparse NMR data were available. Additional detailed analysis was performed for a S100A1 protein. Namely, we successfully predicted Nuclear Overhauser Effect signals on the basis of low-energy structures obtained from chemical shifts by CABS-NMR. It has been observed that utility of chemical shifts and other types of experimental data (i.e. residual dipolar couplings and methyl-methyl Nuclear Overhauser Effect signals) in the presented modeling pipeline depends mainly on size of a protein and complexity of its topology. In this work, we have provided tools for either post-experiment processing of various kinds of NMR data or fast and low-cost structural analysis in the still challenging field of new fold predictions.