Transferable coarse-grained potential for $\textit{de novo}$ protein folding and design

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple, transferable coarse-grained protein model capable of accurately predicting folding and designing sequences that resemble natural proteins, with promising results in structure prediction and folding simulations.

Contribution

A novel coarse-grained protein model that simultaneously enables protein design and folding prediction with high accuracy and simplicity.

Findings

Designed sequences have similar physical properties to natural ones

Correct folding demonstrated for difficult-to-fold proteins

Folding free energy landscapes are funnelled without native-structure potentials

Abstract

Protein folding and design are major biophysical problems, the solution of which would lead to important applications especially in medicine. Here a novel protein model capable of simultaneously provide quantitative protein design and folding is introduced. With computer simulations it is shown that, for a large set of real protein structures, the model produces designed sequences with similar physical properties to the corresponding natural occurring sequences. The designed sequences are not yet fully realistic and require further experimental testing. For an independent set of proteins, notoriously difficult to fold, the correct folding of both the designed and the natural sequences is also demonstrated. The folding properties are characterized by free energy calculations. which not only are consistent among natural and designed proteins, but we also show a remarkable precision when the folded structures are compared to the experimentally determined ones. Ultimately, this novel coarse-grained protein model is unique in the combination of its fundamental three features: its simplicity, its ability to produce natural foldable designed sequences, and its structure prediction precision. The latter demonstrated by free energy calculations. It is also remarkable that low frustration sequences can be obtained with such a simple and universal design procedure, and that the folding of natural proteins shows funnelled free energy landscapes without the need of any potentials based on the native structure.