Title
Restricted N-glycan conformational space in the PDB and its implication in glycan structure modeling.
Abstract
Understanding glycan structure and dynamics is central to understanding protein-carbohydrate recognition and its role in protein-protein interactions. Given the difficulties in obtaining the glycan's crystal structure in glycoconjugates due to its flexibility and heterogeneity, computational modeling could play an important role in providing glycosylated protein structure models. To address if glycan structures available in the PDB can be used as templates or fragments for glycan modeling, we present a survey of the N-glycan structures of 35 different sequences in the PDB. Our statistical analysis shows that the N-glycan structures found on homologous glycoproteins are significantly conserved compared to the random background, suggesting that N-glycan chains can be confidently modeled with template glycan structures whose parent glycoproteins share sequence similarity. On the other hand, N-glycan structures found on non-homologous glycoproteins do not show significant global structural similarity. Nonetheless, the internal substructures of these N-glycans, particularly, the substructures that are closer to the protein, show significantly similar structures, suggesting that such substructures can be used as fragments in glycan modeling. Increased interactions with protein might be responsible for the restricted conformational space of N-glycan chains. Our results suggest that structure prediction/modeling of N-glycans of glycoconjugates using structure database could be effective and different modeling approaches would be needed depending on the availability of template structures.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002946
PLOS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY
Keywords
Field
DocType
protein structure,glycoproteins,crystal structure,protein structure prediction
Protein structure prediction,Biology,Glycoconjugate,Glycoprotein,Structural similarity,Bioinformatics,Template,Protein Data Bank (RCSB PDB),Glycan,Protein structure
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
9
3
1553-734X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.38
11
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sunhwan Jo113413.08
Hui Sun Lee2415.66
Jeffrey Skolnick313524.44
Wonpil Im413221.26