In search of a dynamical vocabulary: a pipeline to construct a basis of shared traits in large-scale motions of proteins

Abstract

The paradigmatic sequence-structure-dynamics-function relation in proteins is nowadays well established in the scientific community; in particular, large effort has been spent to probe the first connection, indeed providing convincing evidence of its strength and rationalising it in a quantitative and general framework. In contrast, however, the role of dynamics as a link between structure and function has eluded a similarly clear-cut verification and description. In this work, we propose a pipeline aimed at building a basis for the quantitative characterisation of the large-scale dynamics of a set of proteins, starting from the sole knowledge of their native structures. The method hinges on a dynamics-based clusterization, which allows a straightforward comparison with structural and functional protein classifications. The resulting basis set, obtained through the application to a group of related proteins, is shown to reproduce the salient large-scale dynamical features of the dataset. Most interestingly, the basis set is shown to encode the fluctuation patterns of homologous proteins not belonging to the initial dataset, thus highlighting the general applicability of the pipeline used to build it.