Use of noncrystallographic symmetry for automated model building at medium to low resolution

Noncrystallographic symmetry is automatically detected and used to achieve higher completeness and greater accuracy of automatically built protein structures at resolutions of 2.3 Å or poorer.
A novel method is presented for the automatic detection of noncrystallographic symmetry (NCS) in macromolecular crystal structure determination which does not require the derivation of molecular masks or the segmentation of density. It was found that throughout structure determination the NCS-related parts may be differently pronounced in the electron density. This often results in the modelling of molecular fragments of variable length and accuracy, especially during automated model-building procedures. These fragments were used to identify NCS relations in order to aid automated model building and refinement. In a number of test cases higher completeness and greater accuracy of the obtained structures were achieved, specifically at a crystallo­graphic resolution of 2.3 Å or poorer. In the best case, the method allowed the building of up to 15% more residues automatically and a tripling of the average length of the built fragments.