Prospects for de novo phasing with de novo protein models

The prospect of phasing diffraction data sets ‘de novo’ for proteins with previously unseen folds is appealing but largely untested. In a first systematic exploration of phasing with Rosetta de novo models, it is shown that all-atom refinement of coarse-grained models significantly improves both the model quality and performance in molecular replacement with the Phaser software. 15 new cases of diffraction data sets that are unambiguously phased with de novo models are presented. These diffraction data sets represent nine space groups and span a large range of solvent contents (33–79%) and asymmetric unit copy numbers (1–4). No correlation is observed between the ease of phasing and the solvent content or asymmetric unit copy number. Instead, a weak correlation is found with the length of the modeled protein: larger proteins required somewhat less accurate models to give successful molecular replacement. Overall, the results of this survey suggest that de novo models can phase diffraction data for approximately one sixth of proteins with sizes of 100 residues or less. However, for many of these cases, ‘de novo phasing with de novo models’ requires significant investment of computational power, much greater than 10(3) CPU days per target. Improvements in conformational search methods will be necessary if molecular replacement with de novo models is to become a practical tool for targets without homology to previously solved protein structures.