The continuity of protein structure space is an intrinsic property of proteins.

ABSTRACT: The classical view of the space of protein structures is that it is populated by a discrete set of protein folds. For proteins up to 200 residues long, by using structural alignments and building upon ideas of the completeness and continuity of structure space, we show that nearly any structure is significantly related to any other using a transitive set of no more than 7 intermediate structurally related proteins. This result holds for all structures in the Protein Data Bank, even when structural relationships between evolutionary related proteins (as detected by threading or functional analyses) are excluded. A similar picture holds for an artificial library of compact, hydrogen-bonded, homopolypeptide structures. The 3 sets share the global connectivity features of random graphs, in whi

SUBMITTER: Skolnick J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2747181 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature