Title
Caver 3.0: A Tool For The Analysis Of Transport Pathways In Dynamic Protein Structures
Abstract
Tunnels and channels facilitate the transport of small molecules, ions and water solvent in a large variety of proteins. Characteristics of individual transport pathways, including their geometry, physico-chemical properties and dynamics are instrumental for understanding of structure-function relationships of these proteins, for the design of new inhibitors and construction of improved biocatalysts. CAVER is a software tool widely used for the identification and characterization of transport pathways in static macromolecular structures. Herein we present a new version of CAVER enabling automatic analysis of tunnels and channels in large ensembles of protein conformations. CAVER 3.0 implements new algorithms for the calculation and clustering of pathways. A trajectory from a molecular dynamics simulation serves as the typical input, while detailed characteristics and summary statistics of the time evolution of individual pathways are provided in the outputs. To illustrate the capabilities of CAVER 3.0, the tool was applied for the analysis of molecular dynamics simulation of the microbial enzyme haloalkane dehalogenase DhaA. CAVER 3.0 safely identified and reliably estimated the importance of all previously published DhaA tunnels, including the tunnels closed in DhaA crystal structures. Obtained results clearly demonstrate that analysis of molecular dynamics simulation is essential for the estimation of pathway characteristics and elucidation of the structural basis of the tunnel gating. CAVER 3.0 paves the way for the study of important biochemical phenomena in the area of molecular transport, molecular recognition and enzymatic catalysis. The software is freely available as a multiplatform command-line application at http://www.caver.cz.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002708
PLOS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY
Keywords
Field
DocType
crystallography,proteins,algorithms,computational biology,molecular dynamics simulation,cluster analysis,protein conformation
Software tool,Biology,Molecular recognition,Protein design,Molecular dynamics,Bioinformatics,Cluster analysis,Haloalkane dehalogenase,Biochemical Phenomena,Protein structure
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
8
10
1553-7358
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
38
1.62
11
Authors
13
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Eva Chovancova1472.25
Antonin Pavelka2714.13
Petr Benes3744.25
Ondrej Strnad4563.71
Jan Brezovsky5826.54
Barbora Kozlikova612218.59
Artur Gora7543.66
Vilem Sustr8532.29
Martin Klvana9381.62
Petr Medek10593.58
Lada Biedermannova11642.72
Jiri Sochor1211911.85
J Damborský1317718.54