Rapid and reliable protein structure determination via chemical shift threading

Protein structure determination using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy can be both time-consuming and labor intensive. Here we demonstrate how chemical shift threading can permit rapid, robust, and accurate protein structure determination using only chemical shift data. Threading is a relatively old bioinformatics technique that uses a combination of sequence information and predicted (or experimentally acquired) low-resolution structural data to generate high-resolution 3D protein structures. The key motivations behind using NMR chemical shifts for protein threading lie in the fact that they are easy to measure, they are available prior to 3D structure determination, and they contain vital structural information. The method we have developed uses not only sequence and chemical shift similarity but also chemical shift-derived secondary structure, shift-derived super-secondary structure, and shift-derived accessible surface area to generate a high quality protein structure regardless of the sequence similarity (or lack thereof) to a known structure already in the PDB. The method (called E-Thrifty) was found to be very fast (often