Anyone who has ever struggled to fold a roadmap should have an
extra measure of respect for protein molecules, which fold up
all on their own and practically put themselves away in the
glove box. Protein folding is so remarkably efficient that it
has been called a paradox. Thirty years ago Cyrus Levinthal
pointed out that a typical protein molecule has so many possible
configurations that it would need eons to explore all of them
and find the best shape; yet proteins fold in seconds.
Looking at the tangled loops and coils of a folded protein, you
might imagine that the arrangement is haphazard—like a
randomly crumpled map rather than a properly folded
one—but in fact every twist and turn is precisely
specified. Chemically, a protein is a linear polymer, a sequence
of the smaller molecules called amino acids, which are joined
end to end like pop-beads. The sequence of amino acids is the
only information about the protein encoded in the genes, but the
protein can do its job only if the one-dimensional chain of
amino acids folds into the correct three-dimensional structure.
Apparently the sequence alone is enough to guide the folding. If
two protein molecules have the same sequence, they fold up into
the same shape.
One way to gain a better appreciation
of the protein molecule's knack for folding is to simulate it
with a computer program. The most detailed simulations track the
motion of every atom and try to reproduce all the chemistry and
physics going on in the system. The ultimate goal is to predict
the native structure of the protein based on nothing more than
the sequence of amino acids. Unfortunately, that goal is a
distant one. The models require hours of computer time just to
simulate a few picoseconds of molecular dynamics.
I
have been exploring a protein model at the other end of the
complexity scale—a minimalist model, where every aspect of
the simulation is reduced to its simplest possible form. A model
so abstract cannot reveal anything about the structure of
particular protein molecules—it cannot show how insulin or
myoglobin folds—but it may offer clues to some general
principles of protein folding. For example, one might hope to
learn what kinds of amino acid sequences lead to a stable and
compact molecule.
The great advantage of a really
simple model is that you can solve it exactly, at least for
short chains of amino acids. You can examine every possible
folding of every possible sequence, picking out the ones of
interest. You can know with certainty which configurations have
the most favorable properties.
Another advantage of a
minimalist model is that you don't have to be an expert in
protein chemistry or molecular dynamics to play with it. A
curious amateur can write a rudimentary program in a few days or
weeks, and run it on commonly available machinery. Indeed, the
simplified protein structures are so well suited to the needs of
the amateur that I am tempted to call them amteins—they're
not quite ready to turn pro yet. However, I have been persuaded
to choose a name slightly less facetious, and so I shall call
them prototeins.
Foursquare Folding
The specific model
I've been toying with was devised 10 years ago by Ken A. Dill of
the University of California at San Francisco, who has continued
to explore it since then with the help of several colleagues.
Almost all of my experiments merely replicate their earlier
work.
Dill's molecules would not be recognized as
proteins by a biochemist (or by a ribosome, for that matter).
They are radically simplified in three ways.
First,
whereas real proteins are constructed from 20 kinds of amino
acids (which differ in size, shape, electric charge, affinity
for water and other properties), the building blocks of
prototeins come in just two flavors. Dill designates them
H and P, for hydrophobic and
polar; the H units repel water while the
P units attract it.
Second, the various forces
acting between amino acids in proteins (electrostatic
attractions and repulsions, hydrogen bonds, solvent
interactions) are reduced in prototeins to a single rule:
H's like to stick together. The P units in
prototeins are inert, neither attracting nor repelling.
Third, prototeins do their folding on a lattice, as if the
molecules were laid out on graph paper. Think of the
H's and P's as colored dots placed at the grid
points of the lattice; the chemical bonds in the backbone of the
prototein are lines drawn on the grid to connect the dots.
Confining the molecules to a lattice is a major computational
convenience. It keeps the number of configurations finite. If
the chain could bend and twist in continuous space, there would
be no clear way of counting the arrangements, and you could
never be sure you had tried them all. Dill and others have
explored several lattice geometries in both two and three
dimensions. My own experiments all inhabit the two-dimensional
square lattice, which is the simplest.
Dots and lines
on graph paper: That's really all there is to a prototein. Or
else the model could be described in terms of colored beads,
laid down on a board with a gridlike pattern of dimples to hold
the beads in place. To build a sequence of amino acids, you
string together H-beads and P-beads in
whatever order you choose. To fold the molecule, you arrange the
string of beads on the lattice board. The string is not allowed
to stretch or break, and so successive beads in the sequence
have to occupy nearest-neighbor sites on the lattice. No two
beads can be piled up at the same site, and so the chain cannot
cross itself. If two H-beads that are not adjacent
within the linear sequence wind up on adjacent sites after the
chain is folded, their attraction creates a cross-link, or
contact, that helps to stabilize the molecule. Foldings that
give rise to many such contacts are favored over those with few
contacts.
Simple and abstract the model surely
is—so much so that you can't help wondering if the process
of abstraction hasn't sucked all the life out of it. The
squared-off, flattened molecules certainly don't look very
biological. But the proof of the prototein is in the folding.
Self-Avoidance
A program for studying
prototeins has two main tasks to accomplish. The first chore is
to generate all possible sequences of H's and
P's. This part is easy; it's just binary counting. Any
prototein sequence of length r can be mapped onto an
r-bit binary number, simply by replacing each 1 in the
binary representation of the number with an H, and each
0 with a P. The complete set of r-bit
sequences is enumerated by counting from 0 to
2r–1. For example, in the case of r =
5 there are 32 sequences, starting with PPPPP,
PPPPH and PPPHP, and continuing through
HHHHH.
The program's second task is to
generate all possible foldings of each sequence. This is a
little more challenging. A folding is modeled by a self-avoiding
walk: a path through the lattice that visits no site more than
once. The shortest self-avoiding walks are easy to analyze. On
the square lattice there are exactly four self-avoiding walks
one step long, namely the walks that move one site north, east,
west or south of the origin. Each of these walks can be extended
in three different ways to form two-step walks. The walk that
begins with an eastward step can continue with a second step to
the east, north or south; it cannot go west, because it would be
retracing its own steps, and that is forbidden. Thus there are 4
x 3 = 12 walks of two steps each. The same kind of reasoning
shows there are 36 three-step walks. But beyond this point the
counting begins to get messy. Consider the three-step walk that
goes first east, then north, then west. On the fourth step this
walk cannot turn east, since that would constitute illegal
backtracking. It also cannot go south, since it would thereby
return to the origin—a site it has already visited. Hence
there are only two available directions for this particular
walk, whereas some other walks still have three options. It gets
even worse: A walk can box itself in so that there are
no legal moves, and the walk has to be abandoned.
When I began experimenting with algorithms for self-avoiding
walks, I found them so diverting that I thought I might never
get back to the larger project of folding proteins. I could
easily fill up an entire column with self-avoiding
walks—and so that is what I have decided to do. I will
make them the subject of a future column, and here give only a
brief summary of how they fit into the world of prototeins.
To survey all possible foldings of a prototein of r
beads, you must generate all self-avoiding walks of
r–1 steps. There is no shortcut for producing the
complete set of walks; you have to enumerate them all. And each
time you add a step, you have to check to make sure the
destination site is not already occupied. There are tricks for
speeding up the process, but none of them fundamentally change
the nature of the algorithm.
As the walks get longer,
the effort of counting them grows exponentially; adding one step
multiplies the number of walks by about 2.6. Through a
prodigious feat of computing, A. R. Conway and A. J. Guttmann
have counted all the self-avoiding walks of up to 51 steps
(there are more than 1022), but for the amateur in
self-avoidance the practical limit is probably between 20 and 30
steps. If your computer has enough memory, you can store a list
of walks rather than regenerate them for each prototein
sequence; this saves a great deal of time.
Symmetries
can reduce the number of walks you need to generate or store.
For the purposes of molecular modeling, taking two steps east
and one step north is no different from going two steps north
and one step west; the paths are the same but for a 90-degree
rotation. When all such symmetries are taken into account, the
number of unique walks is cut to approximately 1/16th the total
number. But there are still plenty of walks. At a length of 15
steps, 401,629 unique walks remain after all symmetries are
eliminated.
Given a procedure for generating binary
H-P sequences and another procedure for generating
self-avoiding walks, it is a simple matter to combine them. The
idea is to produce all possible combinations of sequences and
walks, folding up each sequence into the geometry defined by
each walk. From this collection of folded molecules you can then
gather statistical information—such as the average number
of H-H contacts—or search for notably good
foldings.
High-Scoring Molecules
What makes for
a good folding? In proteins the usual measure is the Gibbs free
energy, a thermodynamic quantity that depends on both energy and
entropy. If you could tug on the ends of a protein chain and
straighten it out, the result would be a state of high energy
and low entropy. The energy is high because amino acids that
"want" to be close together are held at a distance;
the entropy is low because the straight chain is a highly
ordered configuration. When you let go, the chain springs back
into a shape with lower energy and higher entropy, changes that
translate into a lower value of the Gibbs free energy. The
"native" state of a protein—the folding it
adopts under natural conditions—is usually assumed to be
the state with the lowest possible free energy.
Prototeins can get along with a simpler folding criterion.
Standard practice is to rank foldings simply by counting
H-H contacts. It's more like keeping score
than measuring energy. If the H's are viewed as
analogues of hydrophobic amino acids, the scoring system
reflects the tendency of hydrophobic groups to seek shelter from
water. But the prototein model is so abstract that it doesn't
really matter what kind of force is at play between the
H's. Just say that H's are sticky, and it
takes energy to pull them apart.
One strategy for
finding good folds, then, is to look for configurations that
maximize the number of H-H contacts. A program to carry
out the search runs through all the foldings of all the
sequences of a given length, keeping only those foldings with
the maximum number of contacts.
How many contacts are
possible in a folded prototein? A little doodling on graph paper
shows that the highest possible ratio of contacts to
H's is 7:6. Sequences that attain this limit are
exceedingly rare. (I leave it as a puzzle for the reader to find
the shortest such sequence, which I believe has 26 beads.) But
proteins are not required to solve such mathematical puzzles. To
find the stablest configurations of a given sequence, all you
need do is find the foldings that have more H-H
contacts than any other foldings of the same sequence, whether
or not the number of contacts is the theoretical maximum. There
is a shortcut for identifying these stable foldings. It begins
with the sequence made up entirely of H's, which is
rather like double-sided sticky tape that collapses on itself in
a crumpled ball. If any sequence at all has a folding with a
given number of H-H contacts, then that configuration
must also be among the stablest foldings of the all-H
sequence. In the all-H folding, however, some of the
H's may not form contacts, and so they can be changed
to P's without altering the score of the folding. By
making all such substitutions, you recover the sequence with the
minimum number of H's that can give rise to a given
folding.
Sequences with rigid, heavily cross-linked
folds are fairly rare. Among chains with 21 beads the maximum
number of H-H contacts is 12, and a chain must have at
least 14 H's to reach this limit. There are only 80
sequences of 14 H's and 7 P's that produce 12
contacts, out of the universe of more than two million 21-bead
sequences.
Figure 1 shows some of the 80 maximally cross-linked
21-bead prototeins, along with a few other foldings chosen at
random. The two populations of molecules are very different. The
randomly chosen configurations tend to be loose and floppy, and
their average number of H-H contacts works out to less
than 1. The highest-scoring folds, in contrast, are all very
compact, with the chain either wound around itself in a spiral
shape or folded into zigzags.
A lifelike feature of the
compact foldings is a tendency for the H's to
congregate in the interior of the molecule, leaving the
P's exposed on the surface. The model has no explicit
rule favoring the formation of such a hydrophobic core; it
happens automatically when you select foldings with numerous
H-H contacts. In this connection, Dill points out that
for short prototein chains a two-dimensional lattice model may
be more realistic than a three-dimensional one. The reason is
that the perimeter-to-area ratio of a short chain in two
dimensions approximates the surface-to-volume ratio of a longer
chain in three dimensions.
Not all features of the
high-scoring prototein foldings inspire confidence in the
model's realism. For example, a disproportionate number of the
best sequences have H's at both ends, and these
molecules tend to fold up with their ends tucked into the
hydrophobic core. The reason is easy to see: An H at
the end of a chain can participate in three contacts, whereas
interior H's can have no more than two. But the
sticky-end effect is an artifact of the model; there is no
comparable phenomenon in real proteins.
Another
peculiarity can be traced to the choice of a square lattice. Two
H's on a square lattice can form a contact only if they
are separated within the prototein sequence by an even number of
intervening beads. As a result, every prototein can be divided
into odd and even subsequences that do not interact. No such
parity effect is seen in proteins. This failure of realism is
unfortunate; on the other hand, the segregation of odd and even
sublattices allows some very handy optimizations in a simulation
program.
Escaping Degeneracy
Are folds that maximize the number of H-H
contacts the best folds for a prototein? Not necessarily.
A high H-H score enhances a molecule's stability,
which is certainly a useful property in a biopolymer, but there
are other factors to consider as well. Stability implies that
once a molecule is folded, it will probably stay folded. It's
also important, however, that all molecules with the same
sequence fold up to yield the same structure. The way to achieve
such uniformity is to select sequences that have a unique best
folding, even if that folding does not have the highest possible
H-H score.
A molecule with many equally good
foldings is said to have a degenerate ground state. The
all-P sequence is an obvious example: Every folding has
an H-H score of zero. The all-H sequence is
also degenerate. Obviously, any sequences with unique preferred
foldings must be found between these extremes, but the existence
of such sequences cannot be taken for granted. You can search
for them by sorting all the foldings of a sequence into bins
according to their H-H score; if the highest-scoring
bin has a single occupant, that sequence has a unique best
folding.
On the square lattice, uniquely folding sequences do
exist for all but one of the chain lengths I was able to test.
(The exception is length 5.) The longest chains I examined have
14 beads. Among the 16,384 sequences of this length, 955 have a
unique folding. Within this subset, 96 foldings have seven
H-H contacts, which is the maximum observed in 14-bead
prototeins. The sequences in this elite subset, combining
uniqueness with high stability, might be considered among the
most lifelike prototeins.
Low degeneracy and numerous
contacts are not the only criteria for judging a prototein fold.
Martin Karplus and Eugene Shakhnovich work with
three-dimensional lattice models and employ a more realistic
energy spectrum than the simple contact counting of the
H-P scheme. Their findings highlight the importance of
having a large energy gap between the best folding and the
next-best one. They have also looked into the kinetics of
folding, asking not just which configuration is stablest but
also how long it takes a randomly wriggling molecule to find
that conformation. Among 200 candidate sequences, 30 repeatedly
discovered the state of minimum energy after no more than 50
million small random rearrangements.
How Do Proteins Do It?
Although the prototein model is only a crude caricature
of real protein folding, even this simplified simulation can be
computationally taxing. For prototeins of length r, the
number of sequences is 2r, and the number of foldings
is approximately 2.6r–1; the effort needed to
solve a model is proportional to the product of these numbers.
That product grows steeply. The five-bead model can be solved by
hand, and a commodity computer disposes of the 10-bead model in
seconds. But a chain of 15 beads combines 32,768 sequences with
148,752 folds, for a total of almost 5 billion cases. At 20
beads, the product of sequences and folds is over 20 trillion,
which is way beyond the limit of this amateur's patience (and
lifespan).
Attacking these models with brute-force
computations could turn out to be comically stupid. Maybe
there's some clever algorithm waiting to be discovered that will
make folding easy. Maybe, but not likely. In the past few months
two groups have proved that models much like the one described
here belong in the class of hard problems known as NP-complete.
Bonnie Berger and Tom Leighton give a proof for the
three-dimensional H-P model. The two-dimensional case
is proved in a quite different way by Pierluigi Crescenzi,
Deborah Goldman, Christos Papadimitriou, Antonio Piccolboni and
Mihalis Yannakakis.
Showing that a problem is
NP-complete doesn't actually prove it is hard; NP-completeness
merely certifies that the problem is as hard as a bunch of
others, and a method for efficiently solving any one of the
problems could be adapted to all the rest. Some miraculous
algorithm could sweep the whole class of problems away. But
don't hold your breath.
Which brings us back to
Levinthal's question: If protein folding is so hard, how do
proteins do it? There are three kinds of answers.
One
possibility is that protein molecules are capable of
mathematical wizardry beyond the reach of conventional
computers. This would stand the NP-completeness result on its
head; instead of proving that protein folding is hard, it would
show that everything else is easy. You could encode an instance
of any NP-complete problem in a synthetic sequence of amino
acids, then let the protein fold itself up; from the folded
configuration you could read out the solution to the original
problem.
Another answer is that proteins, contrary to
their reputation, do not always fold efficiently and
spontaneously. Some of them need help, in the form of
"chaperone" molecules. Some may fold erroneously and
be recycled by proteolytic enzymes. And it's possible that the
native state of some proteins is not in fact the state of lowest
free energy. A biological molecule doesn't have to be absolutely
stable; it only has to last long enough to do its job. Perhaps
the appropriate model of protein folding is not an exhaustive
search for the best conformation but an approximation algorithm
that is guaranteed to quickly find a good folding. William E.
Hart and Sorin Istrail have published just such an algorithm for
the H-P model.
The third option is that
proteins do quickly find the best among all possible foldings,
but only because they have evolved to exhibit precisely this
property. In other words, the only amino acid sequences that
survive under natural selection are those that happen to fold
rapidly. Sequences that fold hierarchically could fit this
description: If small sections of the chain condense
independently into secondary structures such as helices, which
then aggregate without further internal rearrangement, the
combinatorial monster might be tamed. Although this mechanism
cannot explain everything about protein folding—indeed,
Dill argues that secondary structures are a consequence of
compact folding rather than a cause—it certainly helps.
In any case, the idea that any arbitrary amino acid
sequence would fold efficiently is surely
overoptimistic—which nixes the fantasy of a
protein-folding computer for NP-complete problems. But the
subset of rapidly folding sequences remains poorly understood.
Computational models, even simplistic ones, offer a means of
probing it.
In this connection it is worth noting that
nature itself has hardly begun to explore the full space of
amino acid sequences. All the proteins in all the organisms that
ever lived on the earth could not sample more than an utterly
negligible fraction of the 20100 or so possible
sequences. Thus a computation something like the ones carried
out in the H-P model is running at this moment, all
over the planet, in the big green computer.
© Brian Hayes