Internal Coordinate Normal Mode Analysis: A Strategy to Predict Protein Conformational Transitions

Abstract

We analyze the capacity of normal mode analysis in internal coordinates' space to generate large-amplitude structural deformations that can describe the conformational changes occurring upon the binding of proteins to other species. We also analyze how many modes need to be studied to capture a given transition and whether a combination of two modes is better than using a single mode. The technique is tested on known unbound-to-bound structural transitions for a set of single- or multidomain proteins. The results suggest that this approach is a promising way to generate structures for protein docking or for more refined molecular dynamics simulations.