FASPR: An open-source tool for fast and accurate protein side-chain packing

Abstract

Motivation: Protein structure and function are essentially determined by how the side-chain atoms interact with each other. Thus, accurate protein side-chain packing (PSCP) is a critical step toward protein structure prediction and protein design. Despite the importance of the problem, however, the accuracy and speed of current PSCP programs are still not satisfactory. Results: We present FASPR for fast and accurate PSCP by using an optimized scoring function in combination with a deterministic searching algorithm. The performance of FASPR was compared with four state-of-the-art PSCP methods (CISRR, RASP, SCATD and SCWRL4) on both native and non-native protein backbones. For the assessment on native backbones, FASPR achieved a good performance by correctly predicting 69.1% of all the side-chain dihedral angles using a stringent tolerance criterion of 20°, compared favorably with SCWRL4, CISRR, RASP and SCATD which successfully predicted 68.8%, 68.6%, 67.8% and 61.7%, respectively. Additionally, FASPR achieved the highest speed for packing the 379 test protein structures in only 34.3 s, which was significantly faster than the control methods. For the assessment on non-native backbones, FASPR showed an equivalent or better performance on I-TASSER predicted backbones and the backbones perturbed from experimental structures. Detailed analyses showed that the major advantage of FASPR lies in the optimal combination of the dead-end elimination and tree decomposition with a well optimized scoring function, which makes FASPR of practical use for both protein structure modeling and protein design studies.