Characteristics of protein residue-residue contacts and their application in contact prediction

Contact sites between amino acids characterize important structural features of a protein. We investigated characteristics of contact sites in a representative set of proteins and their relations between protein class or topology. For this purpose, we used a non-redundant set of 5872 protein domains, identically categorized by CATH and SCOP databases. The proteins represented alpha, beta, and alpha+beta classes. Contact maps of protein structures were obtained for a selected set of physical distances in the main backbone and separations in protein sequences. For each set a dependency between contact degree and distance parameters was quantified. We indicated residues forming contact sites most frequently and unique amino acid pairs which created contact sites most often within each structural class. Contact characteristics of specific topologies were compared to the characteristics of their protein classes showing protein groups with a distinguished contact characteristic. We showed that our results could be used to improve the performance of recent top contact predictor — direct coupling analysis. Our work provides values of contact site propensities that can be involved in bioinformatic databases. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00894-014-2497-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.