Section: New Results

Docking Symmetrical Protein Structures

Many proteins form symmetrical complexes in which each structure contains two or more identical copies of the same sub-unit. We recently developed a novel polar Fourier docking algorithm called “Sam” for automatically assembling symmetrical protein complexes. A journal article describing the Sam algorithm has been published [8]. An article describing the results obtained when using Sam to dock several symmetrical protein complexes from the “CASP/CAPRI” docking experiment has also been published [53]. This study showed that many of the models of protein structures built by members of the “CASP” fold prediction community are “dockable” in the sense that Sam is able to find acceptable docking solutions from amongst the CASP models.

More recently, we are working to extend the polar Fourier correlation algorithm to use very high angular resolution spherical Bessel basis functions. As part of this work, we have developed a very fast recursive algorithm for calculating high order Clebsch-Gordan coupling coefficients [30]. A manuscript describing this work has been submitted to a quantum mechanics journal.