Prediction of protein flexibility using a conformationally restrained contact map

Knowledge of protein flexibility is crucial to understanding protein function. However, probing protein flexibility by either experiment or computational simulations is a difficult process. In particular, many computational approaches to understanding protein flexibility require an experimentally determined protein structure. The Conformationally Restrained Contact Map (CoRe-CMap) approach reported here couples protein disorder predictions with protein structure predictions and only requires sequence data to predict protein flexibility. This paper reports the application of the CoRe-CMap model to predicting Lipari-Szabo order parameters of all proteins for which experimentally derived Lipari-Szabo order parameters are available in the BioMagResBank: the median root mean square deviation between a protein's predicted and experimentally derived order parameters is 0.124. Additionally, application of the CoRe-CMap model to predict Lipari-Szabo order parameters for the 10th Type III Domain in Fibronectin and a homologous domain from Tenascin demonstrates the ability of CoRe-CMap to predict functionally important differences in protein flexibility.