Expedience of Protein Folding Modeling during Progressive Elongation of Polypeptide Chain

ABSTRACT

Proteins are grouped into various families according to their evolutionary origin. Analyzing such types of families based on their inter residue interactions is crucial because algorithms that search for pair wise homologies can miss important relations and produce false hits. Several statistical models have been created to aid in the classification but so far had only partial success. In this work, we have analyzed the variation of long-range contacts in different bin intervals as well as characterized the long-range order in a set of 37 families of homologous proteins belonging to different structural classes. The results reveal the family specific long-range contacts as well as variation of long-range order in different structural classes. The pair-wise residue preference to form long-range contacts reveals the dominance of hydrophobic residues irrespective of the structural class. We also provide visual examples of long-range contact network pattern in the different structural classes.

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