Characterizing the regularity of tetrahedral packing motifs in protein tertiary structure

While protein secondary structure is well understood, representing the repetitive nature of tertiary packing in proteins remains difficult. We have developed a construct called the relative packing group (RPG) that applies the clique concept from graph theory as a natural basis for defining the packing motifs in proteins. An RPG is defined as a clique of residues, where every member contacts all others as determined by the Delaunay tessellation. Geometrically similar RPGs define a regular element of tertiary structure or tertiary motif (TerMo). This intuitive construct provides a simple approach to characterize general repetitive elements of tertiary structure.

A dataset of over 4 million tetrahedral RPGs was clustered using different criteria to characterize the various aspects of regular tertiary structure in TerMos. Grouping this data within the SCOP classification levels of Family, Superfamily, Fold, Class and PDB showed that similar packing is shared across different folds. Classification of RPGs based on residue sequence locality reveals topological preferences according to protein sizes and secondary structure. We find that larger proteins favor RPGs with three local residues packed against a non-local residue. Classifying by secondary structure, helices prefer mostly local residues, sheets favor at least two local residues, while turns and coil populate with more local residues. To depict these TerMos, we have developed 2 complementary and intuitive representations: (i) Dirichlet process mixture density estimation of the torsion angle distributions and (ii) kernel density estimation of the Cartesian coordinate distribution. The TerMo library and representations software are available upon request.