Probing different conformational states of polar organizing protein Z with AlphaFold

Abstract

AlphaFold has been a remarkably powerful tool to predict the structures of proteins. Here, we demonstrate that AlphaFold is capable of sampling different conformational states of the oligomerization domain of polar organizing protein Z (PopZ). More broadly, our work suggests that conformational heterogeneity can be extracted from AlphaFold without directly modifying the input multiple sequence alignment.