MEGADOCK-Web: an integrated database of high-throughput structure-based protein-protein interaction predictions.

BACKGROUND: Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) play several roles in living cells, and computational PPI prediction is a major focus of many researchers. The three-dimensional (3D) structure and binding surface are important for the design of PPI inhibitors. Therefore, rigid body protein-protein docking calculations for two protein structures are expected to allow elucidation of PPIs different from known complexes in terms of 3D structures because known PPI information is not explicitly required. We have developed rapid PPI prediction software based on protein-protein docking, called MEGADOCK. In order to fully utilize the benefits of computational PPI predictions, it is necessary to construct a comprehensive database to gather prediction results and their predicted 3D complex structures and to make them easily accessible. Although several databases exist that provide predicted PPIs, the previous databases do not contain a sufficient number of entries for the purpose of discovering novel PPIs. RESULTS: In this study, we constructed an integrated database of MEGADOCK PPI predictions, named MEGADOCK-Web. MEGADOCK-Web provides more than 10 times the number of PPI predictions than previous databases and enables users to conduct PPI predictions that cannot be found in conventional PPI prediction databases. In MEGADOCK-Web, there are 7528 protein chains and 28,331,628 predicted PPIs from all possible combinations of those proteins. Each protein structure is annotated with PDB ID, chain ID, UniProt AC, related KEGG pathway IDs, and known PPI pairs. Additionally, MEGADOCK-Web provides four powerful functions: 1) searching precalculated PPI predictions, 2) providing annotations for each predicted protein pair with an experimentally known PPI, 3) visualizing candidates that may interact with the query protein on biochemical pathways, and 4) visualizing predicted complex structures through a 3D molecular viewer. CONCLUSION: MEGADOCK-Web provides a huge amount of comprehensive PPI predictions based on docking calculations with biochemical pathways and enables users to easily and quickly assess PPI feasibilities by archiving PPI predictions. MEGADOCK-Web also promotes the discovery of new PPIs and protein functions and is freely available for use at http://www.bi.cs.titech.ac.jp/megadock-web/ .

MEGADOCK 4.0: an ultra-high-performance protein-protein docking software for heterogeneous supercomputers.

SUMMARY: The application of protein-protein docking in large-scale interactome analysis is a major challenge in structural bioinformatics and requires huge computing resources. In this work, we present MEGADOCK 4.0, an FFT-based docking software that makes extensive use of recent heterogeneous supercomputers and shows powerful, scalable performance of >97% strong scaling. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: MEGADOCK 4.0 is written in C++ with OpenMPI and NVIDIA CUDA 5.0 (or later) and is freely available to all academic and non-profit users at: http://www.bi.cs.titech.ac.jp/megadock. CONTACT: akiyama@cs.titech.ac.jp SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Docking-calculation-based method for predicting protein-RNA interactions.

Elucidating protein-RNA interactions (PRIs) is important for understanding many cellular systems. We developed a PRI prediction method by using a rigid-body protein-RNA docking calculation with tertiary structure data. We evaluated this method by using 78 protein-RNA complex structures from the Protein Data Bank. We predicted the interactions for pairs in 78×78 combinations. Of these, 78 original complexes were defined as positive pairs, and the other 6,006 complexes were defined as negative pairs; then an F-measure value of 0.465 was obtained with our prediction system.

Evaluation of CONSRANK-Like Scoring Functions for Rescoring Ensembles of Protein-Protein Docking Poses.

Scoring is a challenging step in protein-protein docking, where typically thousands of solutions are generated. In this study, we ought to investigate the contribution of consensus-rescoring, as introduced by Oliva et al. (2013) with the CONSRANK method, where the set of solutions is used to build statistics in order to identify recurrent solutions. We explore several ways to perform consensus-based rescoring on the ZDOCK decoy set for Benchmark 4. We show that the information of the interface size is critical for successful rescoring in this context, but that consensus rescoring in itself performs less well than traditional physics-based evaluation. The results of physics-based and consensus-based rescoring are partially overlapping, supporting the use of a combination of these approaches.

Robust effects of Tsr-CheBp and CheA-CheYp affinity in bacterial chemotaxis.

OBJECTIVE: Cell motility and chemotaxis play a role in the virulence of pathogenic bacteria, such as escape from host immune responses. Escherichia coli chemotaxis provides a well-characterized model system for the bacterial chemotaxis network. Two features of E. coli chemotaxis include signal amplification and robustly accurate adaptation. Recent simulation studies with models considering the effects of other receptors have suggested possible mechanisms for signal amplification. Although precise adaptation to aspartate has been explained by conventional kinetic models, the adaptation behavior of models incorporating the effects of other receptors remains unclear. METHODS: We concentrated on how receptor crosstalk affects minimization of adaptation error and compared models in which the contribution of other receptors varied. RESULTS: We demonstrated that the model is adaptable to attractant concentrations ranging from 0.1microM to 10mM with a decreased error rate (from 8% to 2%) when the kinetic constant of CheA and phosphorylated CheY dissociation is increased. CONCLUSION: The results suggest that accurate adaptation is maintained through control of both the interaction of cytoplasmic Che proteins and the activity of the receptor complex.

Rigid-Docking Approaches to Explore Protein-Protein Interaction Space.

Protein-protein interactions play core roles in living cells, especially in the regulatory systems. As information on proteins has rapidly accumulated on publicly available databases, much effort has been made to obtain a better picture of protein-protein interaction networks using protein tertiary structure data. Predicting relevant interacting partners from their tertiary structure is a challenging task and computer science methods have the potential to assist with this. Protein-protein rigid docking has been utilized by several projects, docking-based approaches having the advantages that they can suggest binding poses of predicted binding partners which would help in understanding the interaction mechanisms and that comparing docking results of both non-binders and binders can lead to understanding the specificity of protein-protein interactions from structural viewpoints. In this review we focus on explaining current computational prediction methods to predict pairwise direct protein-protein interactions that form protein complexes.

Specificity of broad protein interaction surfaces for proteins with multiple binding partners.

Analysis of protein-protein interaction networks has revealed the presence of proteins with multiple interaction ligand proteins, such as hub proteins. For such proteins, multiple ligands would be predicted as interacting partners when predicting all-to-all protein-protein interactions (PPIs). In this work, to obtain a better understanding of PPI mechanisms, we focused on protein interaction surfaces, which differ between protein pairs. We then performed rigid-body docking to obtain information of interfaces of a set of decoy structures, which include many possible interaction surfaces between a certain protein pair. Then, we investigated the specificity of sets of decoy interactions between true binding partners in each case of alpha-chymotrypsin, actin, and cyclin-dependent kinase 2 as test proteins having multiple true binding partners. To observe differences in interaction surfaces of docking decoys, we introduced broad interaction profiles (BIPs), generated by assembling interaction profiles of decoys for each protein pair. After cluster analysis, the specificity of BIPs of true binding partners was observed for each receptor. We used two types of BIPs: those involved in amino acid sequences (BIP-seqs) and those involved in the compositions of interacting amino acid residue pairs (BIP-AAs). The specificity of a BIP was defined as the number of group members including all true binding partners. We found that BIP-AA cases were more specific than BIP-seq cases. These results indicated that the composition of interacting amino acid residue pairs was sufficient for determining the properties of protein interaction surfaces.

Protein-protein interaction network prediction by using rigid-body docking tools: application to bacterial chemotaxis.

Core elements of cell regulation are made up of protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks. However, many parts of the cell regulatory systems include unknown PPIs. To approach this problem, we have developed a computational method of high-throughput PPI network prediction based on all-to-all rigid-body docking of protein tertiary structures. The prediction system accepts a set of data comprising protein tertiary structures as input and generates a list of possible interacting pairs from all the combinations as output. A crucial advantage of this docking based method is in providing predictions of protein pairs that increases our understanding of biological pathways by analyzing the structures of candidate complex structures, which gives insight into novel interaction mechanisms. Although such exhaustive docking calculation requires massive computational resources, recent advancements in the computational sciences have made such large-scale calculations feasible. In this study we applied our prediction method to a pathway reconstruction problem of bacterial chemotaxis by using two different rigid-body docking tools with different scoring models. We found that the predicted interactions were different between the results from the two tools. When the positive predictions from both of the docking tools were combined, all the core signaling interactions were correctly predicted with the exception of interactions activated by protein phosphorylation. Large-scale PPI prediction using tertiary structures is an effective approach that has a wide range of potential applications. This method is especially useful for identifying novel PPIs of new pathways that control cellular behavior.

MEGADOCK: an all-to-all protein-protein interaction prediction system using tertiary structure data.

The elucidation of protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks is important for understanding cellular structure and function and structure-based drug design. However, the development of an effective method to conduct exhaustive PPI screening represents a computational challenge. We have been investigating a protein docking approach based on shape complementarity and physicochemical properties. We describe here the development of the protein-protein docking software package "MEGADOCK" that samples an extremely large number of protein dockings at high speed. MEGADOCK reduces the calculation time required for docking by using several techniques such as a novel scoring function called the real Pairwise Shape Complementarity (rPSC) score. We showed that MEGADOCK is capable of exhaustive PPI screening by completing docking calculations 7.5 times faster than the conventional docking software, ZDOCK, while maintaining an acceptable level of accuracy. When MEGADOCK was applied to a subset of a general benchmark dataset to predict 120 relevant interacting pairs from 120 x 120 = 14,400 combinations of proteins, an F-measure value of 0.231 was obtained. Further, we showed that MEGADOCK can be applied to a large-scale protein-protein interaction-screening problem with accuracy better than random. When our approach is combined with parallel high-performance computing systems, it is now feasible to search and analyze protein-protein interactions while taking into account three-dimensional structures at the interactome scale. MEGADOCK is freely available at http://www.bi.cs.titech.ac.jp/megadock.

Highly precise protein-protein interaction prediction based on consensus between template-based and de novo docking methods.

BACKGROUND: Elucidation of protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks is important for understanding disease mechanisms and for drug discovery. Tertiary-structure-based in silico PPI prediction methods have been developed with two typical approaches: a method based on template matching with known protein structures and a method based on de novo protein docking. However, the template-based method has a narrow applicable range because of its use of template information, and the de novo docking based method does not have good prediction performance. In addition, both of these in silico prediction methods have insufficient precision, and require validation of the predicted PPIs by biological experiments, leading to considerable expenditure; therefore, PPI prediction methods with greater precision are needed. RESULTS: We have proposed a new structure-based PPI prediction method by combining template-based prediction and de novo docking prediction. When we applied the method to the human apoptosis signaling pathway, we obtained a precision value of 0.333, which is higher than that achieved using conventional methods (0.231 for PRISM, a template-based method, and 0.145 for MEGADOCK, a non-template-based method), while maintaining an F-measure value (0.285) comparable to that obtained using conventional methods (0.296 for PRISM, and 0.220 for MEGADOCK). CONCLUSIONS: Our consensus method successfully predicted a PPI network with greater precision than conventional template/non-template methods, which may thus reduce the cost of validation by laboratory experiments for confirming novel PPIs from predicted PPIs. Therefore, our method may serve as an aid for promoting interactome analysis.

Re-docking scheme for generating near-native protein complexes by assembling residue interaction fingerprints.

Interaction profile method is a useful method for processing rigid-body docking. After the docking process, the resulting set of docking poses could be classified by calculating similarities among them using these interaction profiles to search for near-native poses. However, there are some cases where the near-native poses are not included in this set of docking poses even when the bound-state structures are used. Therefore, we have developed a method for generating near-native docking poses by introducing a re-docking process. We devised a method for calculating the profile of interaction fingerprints by assembling protein complexes after determining certain core-protein complexes. For our analysis, we used 44 bound-state protein complexes selected from the ZDOCK benchmark dataset ver. 2.0, including some protein pairs none of which generated near-native poses in the docking process. Consequently, after the re-docking process we obtained profiles of interaction fingerprints, some of which yielded near-native poses. The re-docking process involved searching for possible docking poses in a restricted area using the profile of interaction fingerprints. If the profile includes interactions identical to those in the native complex, we obtained near-native docking poses. Accordingly, near-native poses were obtained for all bound-state protein complexes examined here. Application of interaction fingerprints to the re-docking process yielded structures with more native interactions, even when a docking pose, obtained following the initial docking process, contained only a small number of native amino acid interactions. Thus, utilization of the profile of interaction fingerprints in the re-docking process yielded more near-native poses.

MEGADOCK 3.0: a high-performance protein-protein interaction prediction software using hybrid parallel computing for petascale supercomputing environments.

BACKGROUND: Protein-protein interaction (PPI) plays a core role in cellular functions. Massively parallel supercomputing systems have been actively developed over the past few years, which enable large-scale biological problems to be solved, such as PPI network prediction based on tertiary structures. RESULTS: We have developed a high throughput and ultra-fast PPI prediction system based on rigid docking, "MEGADOCK", by employing a hybrid parallelization (MPI/OpenMP) technique assuming usages on massively parallel supercomputing systems. MEGADOCK displays significantly faster processing speed in the rigid-body docking process that leads to full utilization of protein tertiary structural data for large-scale and network-level problems in systems biology. Moreover, the system was scalable as shown by measurements carried out on two supercomputing environments. We then conducted prediction of biological PPI networks using the post-docking analysis. CONCLUSIONS: We present a new protein-protein docking engine aimed at exhaustive docking of mega-order numbers of protein pairs. The system was shown to be scalable by running on thousands of nodes. The software package is available at: http://www.bi.cs.titech.ac.jp/megadock/k/.

In silico screening of protein-protein interactions with all-to-all rigid docking and clustering: an application to pathway analysis.

We propose a computational screening system of protein-protein interactions using tertiary structure data. Our system combines all-to-all protein docking and clustering to find interacting protein pairs. We tuned our prediction system by applying various parameters and clustering algorithms and succeeded in outperforming previous methods. This method was also applied to a biological pathway estimation problem to show its use in network level analysis. The structural data were collected from the Protein Data Bank, PDB. Then all-to-all docking among target protein structures was conducted using a conventional protein-protein docking software package, ZDOCK. The highest-ranked 2000 decoys were clustered based on structural similarity among the predicted docking forms. The features of generated clusters were analyzed to estimate the biological relevance of protein-protein interactions. Our system achieves a best F-measure value of 0.43 when applied to a subset of general protein-protein docking benchmark data. The same system was applied to protein data in a bacterial chemotaxis pathway, utilizing essentially the same parameter set as the benchmark data. We obtained 0.45 for the F-measure value. The proposed approach to computational PPI detection is a promising methodology for mediating between structural studies and systems biology by utilizing cumulative protein structure data for pathway analysis.