Assessing Predictors of Changes in Protein Stability upon Mutation Using Self-Consistency

Abstract

The ability to predict the effect of mutations on protein stability is important for a wide range of tasks, from protein engineering to assessing the impact of SNPs to understanding basic protein biophysics. A number of methods have been developed that make these predictions, but assessing the accuracy of these tools is difficult given the limitations and inconsistencies of the experimental data. We evaluate four different methods based on the ability of these methods to generate consistent results for forward and back mutations, and examine how this ability varies with the nature and location of the mutation. We find that, while one method seems to outperform the others, the ability of these methods to make accurate predictions is limited. © 2012 Thiltgen, Goldstein.