Hinge Atlas: relating protein sequence to sites of structural flexibility

Background: Relating features of protein sequences to structural hinges is important for identifying domain boundaries, understanding structure-function relationships, and designing flexibility into proteins. Efforts in this field have been hampered by the lack of a proper dataset for studying characteristics of hinges. Results: Using the Molecular Motions Database we have created a Hinge Atlas of manually annotated hinges and a statistical formalism for calculating the enrichment of various types of residues in these hinges. Conclusion: We found various correlations between hinges and sequence features. Some of these are expected; for instance, we found that hinges tend to occur on the surface and in coils and turns and to be enriched with small and hydrophilic residues. Others are less obvious and intuitive. In particular, we found that hinges tend to coincide with active sites, but unlike the latter they are not at all conserved in evolution. We evaluate the potential for hinge pre...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Samuel Flores, Long J. Lu, Julie Yang, Nicholas Carriero, Mark Gerstein
• Keywords: BMCBI 2007, Hinge, Hinge Atlas, Hinge Location