REMO: A new protocol to refine full atomic protein models from C-alpha traces by optimizing hydrogen-bonding networks

Protein structure prediction approaches usually perform modeling simulations based on reduced representation of protein structures. For biological utilizations, it is an important step to construct full atomic models from the reduced structure decoys. Most of the current full atomic model reconstruction procedures have defects which either could not completely remove the steric clashes among backbone atoms or generate final atomic models with worse topology similarity relative to the native structures than the reduced models. In this work, we develop a new protocol, called REMO, to generate full atomic protein models by optimizing the hydrogen-bonding network with basic fragments matched from a newly constructed backbone isomer library of solved protein structures. The algorithm is benchmarked on 230 nonhomologous proteins with reduced structure decoys generated by I-TASSER simulations. The results show that REMO has a significant ability to remove steric clashes, and meanwhile retains good topology of the reduced model. The hydrogen-bonding network of the final models is dramatically improved during the procedure. The REMO algorithm has been exploited in the recent CASP8 experiment which demonstrated significant improvements of the I-TASSER models in both atomic-level structural refinement and hydrogen-bonding network construction.