Abstract

Motivation: Structural alignment is an important tool for understanding the evolutionary relationships between proteins. However, finding the best pairwise structural alignment is difficult, due to the infinite number of possible superpositions of two structures. Unlike the sequence alignment problem, which has a polynomial time solution, the structural alignment problem has not been even classified as solvable.

Results: We study one of the most widely used measures of protein structural similarity, defined as the number of pairs of residues in two proteins that can be superimposed under a predefined distance cutoff. We prove that, for any two proteins, this measure can be optimized for all but finitely many distance cutoffs. Our method leads to a series of algorithms for optimizing other structure similarity measures, including the measures commonly used in protein structure prediction experiments. We also present a polynomial time algorithm for finding a near-optimal superposition of two proteins. Aside from having a relatively low cost, the algorithm for near-optimal solution returns a superposition of provable quality. In other words, the difference between the score of the returned superposition and the score of an optimal superposition can be explicitly computed and used to determine whether the returned superposition is, in fact, the best superposition.

Contact:poleksic@cs.uni.edu

Supplementary information:Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

1 INTRODUCTION

Protein structural alignment is a valuable tool for protein fold and function classification. The success of the structural genomics initiative, which aims to experimentally determine 3D structures of thousands of representative proteins, critically depends on our ability to develop accurate tools for comparison of protein structures (Goldsmith-Fischman and Honig, 2003). However, despite its utmost importance, the problem still lacks a fast and accurate solution. While some structural similarity scoring functions can be approximated in polynomial time (Kolodny and Linial, 2003; Xu et al., 2007), there has been no procedure (of any running time) to optimize any commonly used structural alignment measure (Caprara et al., 2004; Goldman et al., 1999; Zhang and Skolnick, 2005). In their review article on progress in the field of structure comparison, Taylor and coworkers write: ‘In structure comparison, we do not even have an algorithm that guarantees an optimal answer for pairs of structures’ (Eidhammer et al., 2000).

There are several different, but related definitions of an optimal alignment of two proteins. Some methods define an optimal superposition as a superposition that minimizes the distances between the aligned atoms (Oldfield, 2007; Ortiz et al., 2002; Russell and Barton, 1992; Shindyalov and Bourne, 1998; Subbiah et al., 1993; Ye and Godzik, 2003). Other methods attempt to minimize the difference between the intra-atomic distances (Alexandrov et al., 1992; Holm and Sander, 1993; Orengo and Taylor, 1996; Taylor and Orengo, 1989; Vriend and Sander, 1991).

Several methods for improved matching of protein structures have recently been introduced, including the methods based on the phenotypic plasticity (Csaba et al., 2008) and the method for flexible alignments by a sequence of local transformations (Rocha et al., 2009).

Perhaps the most intuitive and most widely used measure of similarity of two proteins is the largest number of atoms (such as alpha-carbons, CA) in two structures that can be superimposed under a specified distance of each other. From now on, we will denote this metric by “CA≤σ”, where σ > 0 denotes the distance threshold in ångströms.

Many structural alignment measures build upon CA≤σ, including GDT (Zemla, 2003), AL0 (Sali and Blundell, 1993), MaxSub (Siew et al., 2000), CA-atoms <3 Å (Ginalski et al., 2005), Q-score (Ginalski et al., 2005) and TM-Score (Zhang and Skolnick, 2005). The Global Distance Test (GDT) is routinely used to evaluate the quality of models in the CASP experiment (Moult et al., 2007). The accuracy of a predicted model in CASP is measured by the GDT_TS score, which represents the average of GDT scores computed at several distance thresholds. More specifically,

where GDT_Pn denotes percent of CA atoms that can be structurally superimposed under n ångströms.

One of the main measures of model quality in LiveBench is ‘CA-atoms <3 Å’ (Ginalski et al., 2005) (in our notation CA < 3). Due to the difficulty in optimizing the scoring function itself, LiveBench approximates CA < 3 using 3deval, a program that attempts to maximize another metric, namely 3D-score.

CAFASP benchmark of fully automated structure prediction servers (Fischer et al., 2003) uses MaxSub to assess the quality of servers' predictions. MaxSub is defined as the weighted fraction of the residues in the model falling within 3.5 Å of the aligned residues in the experimental structure (Siew et al., 2000).

Irrespective of the scoring system used, the major difficulty that any structural alignment method must overcome is the infinite (uncountable) space of all possible structural superpositions. To circumvent this problem, current research in the field focuses on reducing the size of search space by enumerating a relatively small, but representative set of superpositions. However, while the solutions obtained by heuristic approaches are often accurate, they are never guaranteed to be even close to the optimal solutions.

An obvious way to address the limitations of heuristic techniques is to develop a fast and extremely accurate method for maximizing CA≤σ. Such a method would allow for accurate computation of a range of structural alignment measures, including GDT_TS, AL0 and MaxSub.

In this article we present: The first algorithm is capable of finding a superposition that is arbitrarily close to an optimal superposition. More specifically, for any given distance cutoff σ > 0 and any ε > 0, the algorithm returns a superposition that fits at least as many residue pairs under the distance σ + ε as the optimal superposition fits under the distance σ. In addition to having relatively low time complexity and being amenable to parallel implementations, our algorithm provides the ‘solution quality’, which is defined as the difference between the score of the returned superposition and the score of an optimal superposition. The solution quality metric can be used to determine whether the returned superposition is, in fact, an optimal superposition (or whether another and more detailed search is needed).

1. A polynomial time algorithm that returns a superposition of any specified accuracy, and

2. A procedure that returns an optimal superposition, for all but finitely many distance cutoffs.

Our work on the algorithm for approximate solution was inspired by the excellent study of Kolodny and Linial on the polynomial-time approximation scheme for a class of continuous structural similarity measures (Kolodny and Linial, 2003). However, we emphasize that the results presented here cannot be derived from their study, since the objective function CA≤σ does not belong to the category of scoring functions described by Kolodny and Linial. In fact, the class of scoring functions amenable to techniques of Kolodny and Linial (namely the class of functions satisfying the Lipschitz condition) does not include GDT_TS, AL0, MaxSub, TM-score, Q-score, and some other protein structure similarity metrics.

Finally, we address an open problem of finding a procedure that returns an optimal superposition of two structures. We present a procedure that is guaranteed to return an optimal solution with probability one, i.e. for all but finitely many distance cutoffs. However, we emphasize that the algorithm for optimal solution is not practical. This is expected, since the problem has already been proven to be NP-hard (Lathrop, 1994).

2 METHODS AND RESULTS

2.1 Preliminaries and definitions

The pairwise protein structure alignment problem can be formulated as follows: ‘Given two proteins a and b and a distance cutoff σ > 0, find a rigid transformation t and a residue-residue correspondence (alignment) that maximizes the number of pairs of residues in a and t(b) at distance ≤σ’. We call t a σ-optimal transformation for a and b. Note that, without loss of generality, we can assume that the protein a is held fixed, while protein b is transformed.

In order to precisely formulate the above problem, we need some definitions.

Definition:

A protein is a sequence of points in 3D space

In most applications, ai represent the residues’ CA.

Definition:

An alignment of proteins a=(a1, a2,…, an) and b=(b1, b2,…, bm) is a sequence of pairs of points from a and b:

where 1 ≤ i1<…<ikn and 1 ≤ j1<…<jkm.

Definition:

A σ-optimal alignment of proteins a=(a1, a2,…, an) and b=(b1, b2,…, bm), denoted by S(a, b; σ), is an alignment of a and b that maximizes the number of aligned points in a and b at distance ≤σ.

In the definition above, we assume that proteins a and b are fixed in space. S(a, b; σ) refers to an optimal pairing of amino-acid letters, without changing the structural superposition. It is well known that, for any two, fixed in space, proteins a and b of length n and any σ > 0, the alignment S(a, b; σ) can be computed in O(n2) time using a standard dynamic programming algorithm (Smith and Waterman, 1981). From now on, we will use |S(a, b; σ)| to denote the number of pairs of points in S(a, b; σ) at distance ≤σ.

Definition:

A σ-optimal transformation for a and b, denoted by tσ, is a rigid transformation that maximizes |S(a, t(b); σ)| over all rigid transformations t. In other words

It is easy to see that CA≤σ is precisely |S(a, tσ(b); σ)|, where tσ is a σ-optimal transformation for a and b.

Definition:

A transformation t satisfying

is called a (σ, ε)-optimal transformation for a and b, denoted by tεσ.

Note that tεσ is any transformation t with the property that the number of pairs of points in a and t(b) that can be superimposed at distance ≤σ + ε is not smaller than the number of pairs of points in a and tσ(b) that can be superimposed at distance ≤σ.

We recall that any orientation preserving rigid transformation t is a composition of a rotation and a translation t=ttrtrot. Any such transformation can also be viewed as a point in 6D space

where α and γ are the Euler angles of rotations around the z-axis, β is the angle of rotation around the x−axis, and u, v and w are the translations along the axes x, y and z, respectively.

2.2 Near-optimal solution

Without loss of generality, we can assume that both proteins a and b have center of mass at the origin. Thus, a superposition that aligns the center of mass of a and the center of mass of b will be the first (among many) superpositions inspected by our method. Our algorithm for finding tεσ, called EPSILON-OPTIMAL, is based on the continuity of rigid transformations (Kolodny and Linial, 2003). In other words, small change in any one of the six arguments of t=(α, β, γ, u, v, w) results in a small change in the spatial position of the protein b. For example, if b is rotated around the x axis by a small angle δ > 0, then the distance travelled by any point p(x, y, z)∈b is

where Rb denotes the radius of the bounding sphere for b.

2.2.1 Algorithm for near optimal solution.

It is not difficult to see that the only candidates for tεσ are those transformations that do not move the protein b far away from a, i.e. the transformations t=(α, β, γ, u, v, w)∈R6 from the closed interval

where
and mxa, mya, mza and mxb, myb, mzb are the dimensions of the smallest intervals B(a) and B(b) in R3 enclosing a and b, respectively (Figure 1).

Fig. 1.

The projection of the enclosing intervals of proteins a and b, B(a) and B(b), respectively, onto the xy plane.

Fig. 1.

The projection of the enclosing intervals of proteins a and b, B(a) and B(b), respectively, onto the xy plane.

To further reduce the size of the search space, we define a finite set NET(ε) of transformations from the interval I, obtained by partitioning I into small 6D boxes. The points of NET(ε) are the vertices of 6D subintervals of I of dimensions

(1)

(2)
Note that, in order to find tεσ, it is enough to inspect the transformations from NET(ε). This is because for every t=(α, β, γ, u, v, w)∈I, there exists a transformation such that
(3)

(4)
and hence
(5)
where denotes the Euclidean distance between t(bi) and . In particular, if t is a σ-optimal transformation tσ then is a (σ, ε)-optimal transformation tεσ.

A pseudo-code for EPSILON-OPTIMAL is given in the Supplementary Material.

2.2.2 Time complexity.

For a pair of proteins of lengths n, the worst-case behavior of EPSILON-OPTIMAL occurs when the radius of the bounding sphere of b is linear in n, i.e. Rb=O(n). In this case, the total number of transformations inspected by EPSILON-OPTIMAL is NET(ε)=O(n66). For every such transformation, an optimal correspondence can be computed using a O(n2) dynamic programming procedure, resulting in O(n86) worst-case running time of EPSILON-OPTIMAL.

However, the total cost of EPSILON-OPTIMAL is usually better in practice, since the volume of a protein scales proportionally with the number of residues (Hao et al., 1992). For instance, if b is a globular protein, then Rb=O(n1/3) and thus the running time of EPSILON-OPTIMAL is only O(n46).

For comparison, the efficiency of the algorithm of Kolodny and Linial for optimizing the class of scoring functions satisfying Lipschitz condition is O(n106) for globular and O(n126) for non-globular proteins.

2.2.3 Solution quality.

The ‘quality’ of the solution tεσ provided by EPSILON-OPTIMAL is defined as the difference between the score of an optimal solution tσ and the score of tεσ:

(6)
While Err(tεσ) cannot be computed within the time window of EPSILON-OPTIMAL (since we do not know tσ), the upper bound of Err(tεσ):
(7)
can easily be calculated with a small modification of EPSILON-OPTIMAL, without increasing its asymptotic cost (an extra call to O(n2) alignment procedure).

2.3 Optimal solution

Our procedure for finding optimal solution is based on the observation that f(σ)=|S(a, tσ(b); σ)| is a step function of σ, with finitely many steps σ1,…, σk (Figure 2A). If σ > 0 is any real number different from each σi, then, for some sufficiently small ε > 0, f(σ + ε)=f(σ − ε) (Figure 2B). Since

it follows that, for any such ε, the transformation tεσ−ε is an optimal transformation Ï.

Fig. 2.

(A) The graph of f(σ)=|S(a, tσ(b); σ)|. Note that f : R+N is a step function, with k steps σ1,…, σk, where k does not exceed the length of the shorter of two proteins, a and b. (B) For every σ∈{σ1,…, σk} there exists ε > 0, such that f(σ − ε)=f(σ+ε).

Fig. 2.

(A) The graph of f(σ)=|S(a, tσ(b); σ)|. Note that f : R+N is a step function, with k steps σ1,…, σk, where k does not exceed the length of the shorter of two proteins, a and b. (B) For every σ∈{σ1,…, σk} there exists ε > 0, such that f(σ − ε)=f(σ+ε).

The algorithm for optimal solution can be summarized in a pseudo-code:

OPTIMAL(a, b, σ) Note that OPTIMAL returns an optimal superposition with probability one, i.e. whenever the input distance threshold σ is not one of σ1,…, σk. However, the number of operations performed by OPTIMAL cannot be estimated upfront, since its running time depends on the difference between σ and the closest σi (which depends on the intrinsic geometry of the input proteins a and b).

1.   ε←1

2.   do

3.    tεσ←EPSILON-OPTIMAL(a, b, σ, ε)

4.    tεσ−ε←EPSILON-OPTIMAL(a, b, σ−ε, ε)

5.    ε←ε/2

6.   while |S(a, tεσ(b); σ+ε)|−|S(a, tεσ−ε(b);σ)|>0

7.   returntεσ−ε

2.4 Practical benefits

Aside from having relatively low cost, EPSILON-OPTIMAL is amenable to parallel computing since NET(ε) can be partitioned and the search procedure carried out simultaneously on the subsets of NET(ε). To assess potential benefits of parallel implementations of EPSILON-OPTIMAL, we developed and tested a faster, heuristic version of the algorithm, called MAX-PAIRS.

For efficiency, MAX-PAIRS explores only a small subset of NET(ε), consisting of only those transformations from NET(ε) that are close to some high-scoring, ‘seed’ transformations. The assumption is that an optimal transformation is not far away from a sufficiently high scoring transformation, obtained by some fast and fairly accurate heuristic method.

To compute each seed transformation, MAX-PAIRS applies a well known, iterative alignment extension algorithm (see, e.g. Siew et al., 2000) to S=S(a, t(b); σ), where t is the transformation minimizing RMSD between short segments of k consecutive residues in a and b (default is k=5). In every iteration of the extension algorithm, the proteins are superimposed to minimize the RMSD between the aligned residues (Kabsch, 1976) and a new alignment is computed by dynamic programming. The whole procedure is repeated until the alignment length |S(a, t(b); σ)| remains unchanged between two consecutive iterations.

After generating all high scoring seed transformations, MAX-PAIRS ‘refines’ them, one by one, by exploring the ‘nearby conformations’ from NET(ε). More specifically (and assuming that the seed transformation has already been applied to b), the algorithm selects three pairs of aligned points {(aik, bik)}k=13 from S(a, b; σ) and then searches NET(ε) while keeping the points aik and bik ‘in contact’, i.e. at distance ≤σ. By examining only the transformations τ such that ||aik−τ(bik)||≤σ, for all k∈{1, 2, 3}, MAX-PAIRS significantly reduces the size of the search space, resulting in increased efficiency (for technical details, we refer the reader to the Supplementary Material).

2.4.1 Added value of optimal solution.

We tested the performance of MAX-PAIRS on a representative set of protein chains selected from the SCOP database (Murzin et al., 1995). Our test set contains 195 pairs of proteins related at various levels according to SCOP structural classification: 57 family pairs, 75 superfamily pairs, and 63-fold pairs (complete test set can be found at http://bioinformatics.cs.uni.edu/opt_align.html).

The sensitivity of MAX-PAIRS is compared to sensitivity of four methods: CASP's program LGA (Zemla, 2003), TM-align (Zhang and Skolnick, 2005), MAMMOTH (Ortiz et al., 2002), and MUSTANG (Konagurthu et al., 2006). For efficiency, we set the accuracy parameter ε of MAX-PAIRS to 1 (we recall that decreasing ε yields more accurate, but less efficient procedure). The scores for MAMMOTH and MUSTANG, presented in Tables 1 and 2, are shown for reference only, since, in contrast to MAX-PAIRS and LGA, which attempt to maximize CA ≤ σ, these programs seek to optimize a different objective function.

Table 1.

The total number of pairs of residues in the test set that can be superimposed under 3 Å

MAX-PAIRS LGA TM-align Mammoth Mustang
Family 4689 4585 4460 4264 4231
Superfamily 4378 4247 4140 3713 3319
Fold 2870 2720 2634 2100 1834
MAX-PAIRS LGA TM-align Mammoth Mustang
Family 4689 4585 4460 4264 4231
Superfamily 4378 4247 4140 3713 3319
Fold 2870 2720 2634 2100 1834
Table 2.

The total number of pairs of residues in the test set that can be superimposed under 5 Å

MAX-PAIRS LGA TM-align Mammoth Mustang
Family 5251 5130 5059 5019 4983
Superfamily 5240 5033 4928 4702 4562
Fold 3575 3409 3279 2842 2816
MAX-PAIRS LGA TM-align Mammoth Mustang
Family 5251 5130 5059 5019 4983
Superfamily 5240 5033 4928 4702 4562
Fold 3575 3409 3279 2842 2816

As seen in Tables 1 and 2, even at ε=1, MAX-PAIRS compares favorably with the other methods across all SCOP categories and at both distance threshold parameters (3 and 5 Å).

Figure 3 shows the distribution of the added value of MAX-PAIRS, measured by the additional number of CA≤σ pairs detected by our algorithm. As seen in the left tails of the distributions in Figure 3, LGA and TM-align perform better than MAX-PAIRS on several pairs of test structures. This is not surprising, given that LGA, TM-align, and MAX-PAIRS each explore different sets of transformations in search for the best superposition.

Fig. 3.

The distribution of the difference in CA≤σ scores of MAX-PAIRS and LGA (TM-align) provides insight into the advantage of the algorithms for optimal solution.

Fig. 3.

The distribution of the difference in CA≤σ scores of MAX-PAIRS and LGA (TM-align) provides insight into the advantage of the algorithms for optimal solution.

Since MAX-PAIRS searches a subspace of transformations with a ‘fine-tooth comb’, one would also expect to see examples of significantly better performance of MAX-PAIRS compared to other methods. We show one of those examples in Figure 4. Although the cases similar to one in Figure 4 are relatively rare, they illustrate the advantage of a rigorous approach to protein structure comparison.

Fig. 4.

The superpositions of 1jb0C and 1a6lA (same SCOP superfamily) reported by LGA (CA≤3=31) and MAX-PAIRS (CA≤3=55). The thin gray line shows the backbone of 1jb0C (CA atoms only). The black line represents segments of 1a6lA that can be superimposed under 3 Å with the corresponding segments in 1jb0C. In this test case, LGA completely misaligns two structures, even at higher distance thresholds (LGA's CA≤5=36).

Fig. 4.

The superpositions of 1jb0C and 1a6lA (same SCOP superfamily) reported by LGA (CA≤3=31) and MAX-PAIRS (CA≤3=55). The thin gray line shows the backbone of 1jb0C (CA atoms only). The black line represents segments of 1a6lA that can be superimposed under 3 Å with the corresponding segments in 1jb0C. In this test case, LGA completely misaligns two structures, even at higher distance thresholds (LGA's CA≤5=36).

Table 3 shows the efficiency of MAX-PAIRS as a function of ε on the set of pairs of structures from our test set. The analysis presented in Table 3 is performed on a 2.13 GHz Intel(R) CPU computer running Linux. The results summarized in this table suggest that, although both LGA and TM-align are much more efficient programs than MAX-PAIRS, the sensitivity of MAX-PAIRS compares favorably to both of these programs, for each tested accuracy threshold ε.

Table 3.

Speed versus accuracy of MAX-PAIRS

ε Cumulative CA≤3 Time per pair (s)
1.0 11 937 6608
1.5 11 862 713
2.0 11 789 140
2.5 11 711 46
3.0 11 602 19
3.5 11 566
ε Cumulative CA≤3 Time per pair (s)
1.0 11 937 6608
1.5 11 862 713
2.0 11 789 140
2.5 11 711 46
3.0 11 602 19
3.5 11 566

For comparison, the cumulative CA≤3 of LGA and TM-align are 11 552 (2.1 s) and 11 234 (<0.1 s), respectively.

Many pairwise protein structural alignment methods, including the methods discussed in this article, employ a key routine for computing a superposition that maximizes CA≤σ between a pair of protein structures. It is reasonable to expect that improving this superposition increases the accuracy of a protein structure alignment algorithm. We evaluated extent of this increase using the Sisyphus benchmark for the alignment accuracy (Andreeva et al., 2007). The Sisyphus test set contains 125 manually created structural alignments for protein pairs with non-trivial structural relationships. These alignments can be used (as gold standards) for assessing the accuracy of a protein structure alignment method. In order to compare the alignment accuracy of the algorithms in our study with accuracy of the methods previously tested in Sisyphus benchmark, we, like Rocha et al., utilize only a subset of the Sisyphus test set containing 106 pairs of single chain proteins.

To test usefulness of the algorithms for optimizing CA≤σ, we modified the TM-align method by replacing the original TM-align superpositions with the superpositions generated by the MAX-PAIRS program. The modified TM-align program, called MP-TM-align, uses the TM-align scoring function (TM-score) to compute an optimal structural alignment of proteins superimposed with the MAX-PAIRS program. As seen in Table 4, not only the MP-TM-align program outperforms the original TM-align method for each tolerance shift, but the accuracy of this simple hybrid method is comparable to the accuracy of the top performing methods tested by Rocha and coworkers (Rocha et al., 2009).

Table 4.

The agreement with reference alignments for six different tolerance shifts

Tolerance shift

FLEXPROT 0.449 0.672 0.707 0.725 0.742 0.747
MATRAS 0.776 0.806 0.828 0.836 0.847 0.847
PD 0.791 0.849 0.858 0.868 0.881 0.882
PPM 0.782 0.813 0.823 0.833 0.843 0.844
RASH 0.688 0.793 0.812 0.840 0.854 0.855
SSAP 0.750 0.786 0.797 0.804 0.808 0.811
VOROLIGN 0.722 0.765 0.790 0.808 0.826 0.830
DALI 0.800 0.830 0.845 0.851 0.859 0.860
MATT 0.829 0.866 0.889* 0.904* 0.915* 0.917*
LGA 0.765 0.820 0.831 0.839 0.847 0.849
TM-align 0.762 0.815 0.823 0.834 0.841 0.844
MP-TM-align 0.809 0.861 0.875 0.884 0.896 0.896
MP-TM-align+ 0.830* 0.867* 0.881 0.887 0.897 0.898
Tolerance shift

FLEXPROT 0.449 0.672 0.707 0.725 0.742 0.747
MATRAS 0.776 0.806 0.828 0.836 0.847 0.847
PD 0.791 0.849 0.858 0.868 0.881 0.882
PPM 0.782 0.813 0.823 0.833 0.843 0.844
RASH 0.688 0.793 0.812 0.840 0.854 0.855
SSAP 0.750 0.786 0.797 0.804 0.808 0.811
VOROLIGN 0.722 0.765 0.790 0.808 0.826 0.830
DALI 0.800 0.830 0.845 0.851 0.859 0.860
MATT 0.829 0.866 0.889* 0.904* 0.915* 0.917*
LGA 0.765 0.820 0.831 0.839 0.847 0.849
TM-align 0.762 0.815 0.823 0.834 0.841 0.844
MP-TM-align 0.809 0.861 0.875 0.884 0.896 0.896
MP-TM-align+ 0.830* 0.867* 0.881 0.887 0.897 0.898

For the tolerance shift s, the agreement is defined as Is/Lref, where Is is the number of aligned residues that are shifted by no more than s positions in the reference alignment and Lref is the length of the reference alignment (see Rocha et al., 2009). The best results are denoted by asterisk.

It is interesting to note that, according to study of Rocha et al., the most accurate structure alignment methods, such as Matt (Menke et al., 2008), PPM (Csaba et al., 2008) and ProtDeform (Rocha et al., 2009), consider proteins as flexible objects. These methods achieve high alignment accuracy by applying a sequence of different rigid transformations at different sites, rather than a single global rigid transformation. On the other hand, the results of our study show that highly accurate methods can still be developed that rely on a single rigid transformation to assess the similarity of two protein structures.

An even further increase in the accuracy of TM-align can be achieved by utilizing the residue type information into the alignment process. Combining the distance-based measures with the residue mutation scores is a standard technique used in many structure alignment methods, such as CE (Shindyalov and Bourne, 1998). As seen in Table 4, a variant of the MP-TM-align method, called MP-TM-align+, in which the alignment scoring function is defined as the sum of the TM-score and the BLOSUM62 score (Henikoff and Henikoff, 1992) yields the most accurate alignments in the Sisyphus benchmark of the alignment accuracy.

A closer look at the results summarized in Table 4 and those obtained by Rocha et al. reveal a significant difference in the performance of TM-align in these two studies. This difference is due to different versions of TM-align used in two experiments. More specifically, the TM-align program tested in our benchmark is released on 14 March 2009 and is 4% more accurate than the older TM-align program evaluated by Rocha et al. (see http://zhang.bioinformatics.ku.edu/TM-align/).

The alignments of the proteins in the Sisyphus test set generated by LGA, TM-align, MP-TM-align and MP-TM-align+can be downloaded from http://bioinformatics.cs.uni.edu/opt_align.html. The alignments generated by the remaining 10 methods can be found at http://dmi.uib.es/people/jairo/bio/ProtDeform.

There remains a lot of work to be done on speeding up MAX-PAIRS and making it practical for large-scale protein structure analysis. However, even in its present form, MAX-PAIRS can be useful in assessing the performance of protein 3D structure prediction methods. For example, the accuracy of MAX-PAIRS is 3.6% higher than the accuracy of the LGA program, officially used at the biannual CASP competition (http://predictioncenter.org). This is a significant advantage of our method, given that the difference in GDT_TS scores between the first and the second ranked method in CASP7, as measured by LGA, is only 2.6% (3.5% in CASP8).

3 CONCLUSION

The homology between two proteins is often concluded based on their structural similarity. However, due to the infinite (uncountable) space of all possible spatial configurations, finding an optimal superposition for a pair of proteins is a challenging problem.

In this article, we show that the approximate structural alignment problem is tractable for a range of commonly used structural alignment metrics, such as GDT, AL0 and MaxSub. Although our algorithm for near-optimal solution consumes large computational time, the running time can be easily reduced with parallel implementations. An added benefit of the algorithm for approximate solution is that it provides a measure of the solution quality, which signals whether the returned superposition is, in fact, an optimal superposition.

We also present a procedure capable of finding an optimal superposition of any two proteins, for all but finitely many distance thresholds. Although it theoretically addresses a long-standing question of whether such an algorithm exists, our procedure for finding an absolute optimum is too slow for practical applications.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors thank Dr Adam Zemla for kindly providing his LGA program.

Conflict of Interest: none declared.

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Author notes

Associate Editor: Anna Tramontano

Comments

1 Comment
Citations
13 February 2012
Aleksandar Poleksic

Our article fails to cite the algorithm by Ambuhl et al., described in:

Ambuhl, C., Chakraborty, S. and Gartner,B.: "Computing longest common point sets under approximate congruence" Algorithms-ESA 2000; Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1879, pp. 52-64 (2000).

This algorithm is capable of optimizing an almost identical measure of protein structure similarity, namely CA<sigma (as opposed to CA<=sigma, studied here). At the time of writing this paper we were unaware of this highly relevant work, partly because the venue in which the article by Ambuhl et al. appears is not indexed by PubMed.

Conflict of Interest:

None declared

Submitted on 13/02/2012 7:00 PM GMT