Section: New Results

Analytical symmetry detection method AnAnaS

Participants: Guillaume Pagès, Sergei Grudinin, Elvira Kinzina.

Publications: Journal of Structural Biology, 2018 [21], Journal of Structural Biology, 2018 [20].

Macromolecules are generally not rigid bodies at physiological temperature and they adopt different conformational states. Thus, if one considers a macromolecular assembly made of $N$ subunits, do we expect that all the units will be structurally identical to each other? Most probably not, since at any given moment of time, each unit may be sampling a different conformational state. For example, there are plenty of X-ray structures of homo-dimers, where the individual monomers are not structurally identical.

In order to quantitatively assess these differences, we developed a method for Analytical Analysis of Symmetries (AnAnaS) in protein complexes. The method is extremely fast, robust and accurate. Two papers describing the method were published [21], [20]. This method is available on the website of the team (https://team.inria.fr/nano-d/software/ananas/).

Figure 5. System with an octahedral symmetry, with the symmetry axes displayed in SAMSON.