Rosetta Energy Analysis of AlphaFold2 models: Point Mutations and Conformational Ensembles

There has been an explosive growth in the applications of AlphaFold2, and other structure prediction platforms, to accurately predict protein structures from a multiple sequence alignment (MSA) for downstream structural analysis. However, two outstanding questions persist in the field regarding the robustness of AlphaFold2 predictions of the consequences of point mutations and the completeness of its prediction of protein conformational ensembles. We combined our previously developed method SPEACH_AF with model relaxation and energetic analysis with Rosetta to address these questions. SPEACH_AF introduces residue substitutions across the MSA and not just within the input sequence. With respect to conformational ensembles, we combined SPEACH_AF and a new MSA subsampling method, AF_cluster, and for a benchmarked set of proteins, we found that the energetics of the conformational ensembles generated by AlphaFold2 correspond to those of experimental structures and explored by standard molecular dynamic methods. With respect to point mutations, we compared the structural and energetic consequences of having the mutation(s) in the input sequence versus in the whole MSA (SPEACH_AF). Both methods yielded models different from the wild-type sequence, with more robust changes when the mutation(s) were in the whole MSA. While our findings demonstrate the robustness of AlphaFold2 in analyzing point mutations and exploring conformational ensembles, they highlight the need for multi parameter structural and energetic analyses of these models to generate experimentally testable hypotheses.