|
Martin Weigt |
|
|
ISI Torino |
Abstract
The basis of a majority of biological functions is formed by
protein-protein interactions.
Experimental approaches to identify interaction surfaces between
proteins are laborious
or serendipitous tasks and include the generation of co-crystal
structures to gain
detailed molecular pictures of interactions.
The genomic era is starting to provide completely new and promising
possibilities: The
number of sequenced bacterial genomes approaches 1000. Amplification of some
interacting systems (e.g. two-component signal transduction) increases
the number of
homologous proteins by a factor of about 10-fold beyond the genome number;
organization in operons allows for an in-silico identification of
interaction partners.
In our work, we propose a message-passing approach to infer networks
of statistically
coupled residues between interacting protein partners. In the case of bacterial
two-component signal transduction systems, where interaction surfaces are known
due to the existence of an exemplary co-crystal structure, we
successfully identify these
surfaces bothe for kinase / response-regulator pairs and
response-regulator homodimers
from the knowledge of multispecies sequence data alone. The infered model (in
statistical-physics language a disordered 21-states Potts model) is
able to capture
details of these interactions down to single amino-acid resolution and
to distinguish
interacting from non-interacting protein pairs. Our work therefore
provides an example
for a successfull application of statistical-mechanics tools to
computational systems
biology. It is done in collaboration with J.A. Hoch, T. Hwa, H.
Szurmant and R.A.
White.