Polymer uncrossing and knotting in protein folding, and their role in minimal folding pathways

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to quantify the importance of chain non-crossing in protein folding pathways, revealing how topological constraints influence folding mechanisms and pathway diversity across different protein classes.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel computational approach to measure minimal uncrossing costs and analyze folding pathways, highlighting the role of topology in protein folding dynamics.

Findings

Non-crossing distance is a small fraction of total folding distance.

Structural classes can be distinguished by uncrossing distance, with non-crossing distance over chain length best discriminating.

Knotted proteins follow a dominant folding pathway, while alpha proteins exhibit diverse pathways.

Abstract

We introduce a method for calculating the extent to which chain non-crossing is important in the most efficient, optimal trajectories or pathways for a protein to fold. This involves recording all unphysical crossing events of a ghost chain, and calculating the minimal uncrossing cost that would have been required to avoid such events. A depth-first tree search algorithm is applied to find minimal transformations to fold $\alpha$, $\beta$, $\alpha/\beta$, and knotted proteins. In all cases, the extra uncrossing/non-crossing distance is a small fraction of the total distance travelled by a ghost chain. Different structural classes may be distinguished by the amount of extra uncrossing distance, and the effectiveness of such discrimination is compared with other order parameters. It was seen that non-crossing distance over chain length provided the best discrimination between structural and kinetic classes. The scaling of non-crossing distance with chain length implies an inevitable crossover to entanglement-dominated folding mechanisms for sufficiently long chains. We further quantify the minimal folding pathways by collecting the sequence of uncrossing moves, which generally involve leg, loop, and elbow-like uncrossing moves, and rendering the collection of these moves over the unfolded ensemble as a multiple-transformation "alignment". The consensus minimal pathway is constructed and shown schematically for representative cases of an $\alpha$, $\beta$, and knotted protein. An overlap parameter is defined between pathways; we find that $\alpha$ proteins have minimal overlap indicating diverse folding pathways, knotted proteins are highly constrained to follow a dominant pathway, and $\beta$ proteins are somewhere in between. Thus we have shown how topological chain constraints can induce dominant pathway mechanisms in protein folding.