Seminar Tomorrow! ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Torres, Roel Rosalio &lt;rtorres(a)chemistry.harvard.edu&gt; Date: Mon, May 2, 2016 at 12:44 PM Subject: FW: Gevorg Grigoryan Seminar, Tue, May 3rd at 4:15 in the Division Room To: "Siria Serrano (aspuru.facultyassistant(a)gmail.com)&quot; < aspuru.facultyassistant(a)gmail.com&gt; Hi Siria, Could you please advertise tomorrow’s seminar to the members of your group? Thanks! Cheers, Roel *From:* Torres, Roel Rosalio *Sent:* Sunday, May 01, 2016 10:16 PM *To:* hellergroup(a)googlegroups.com; Alex Park; Anna Whitney; araguram(a)college.harvard.edu; Bauer, Nicholas C; Bershtein, Shimon; Bharat Adkar; Bhattacharyya, Sanchari; Cetinbas, Murat; Cheron, Nicolas; Choi, Jeong-Mo; Eric Zinn; Gilson, Amy Ilana; Jacobs, William Monroe; Jason Park; Woodard, Jaie Christina; Magaly Gutierrez (maguti2095(a)gmail.com); Manhart, Michael; Michael Musharbash; Michael Zimet; Muyoung Heo; Naveen Jasty; Niamh Durfee; Raynor Kuang; Robert Lin; Rodrigues, Joao Vierira; rrazban(a)g.harvard.edu; Serohijos, Adrian; Shakhnovich, Eugene; Tijda Argun; Torres, Roel Rosalio; Victor Zhao; xiaole Xia; Yan, Jin; Zhang, Yanmin *Subject:* Gevorg Grigoryan Seminar, Tue, May 3rd at 4:15 in the Division Room Dear Shakhnovich and Heller Groups, Prof Gevorg Grigoryan from Dartmouth will be giving a seminar on *Universal Tertiary Structural Alphabet Describes Protein Sequence-Structure Relationships *on Tuesday, May 3rd at 4:15 in the Division Room. Please see the abstract below for the content of the seminar. This seminar will replace the regular Shakhnovich GM. Thanks! Cheers, Roel *Universal Tertiary Structural Alphabet Describes Protein Sequence-Structure Relationships* We systematically decompose the known protein structural universe into its basic tertiary motifs, which we call TERMs. A TERM is a compact structural fragment that captures the secondary, tertiary, and quaternary environments around a given residue. We seek the set of universal TERMs that capture all structural environments observed in the PDB, finding remarkable degeneracy. Strikingly, only ~600 TERMs are sufficient to describe 50% of the PDB at sub-Angstrom resolution. Further, the PDB appears to be close to converged with respect to TERM usage. On the other hand, more rare geometries also exist and the overall structural coverage grows logarithmically with the number of TERMs. We go on to show that universal TERMs provide an effective means of describing structure-sequence relationships. First, we demonstrate that TERM-based statistics alone are sufficient to recapitulate close-to-native sequences given either NMR or X-ray backbones, with little difference between the two classes (28% and 24% sequence identity, respectively). Furthermore, sequence variability predicted from TERM data agrees closely with evolutionary variation. Second, we show that TERM statistics can discriminate between accurate and erroneous structural models (R = 0.69 between true model accuracy and a TERM-based metric), providing information on poorly predicted regions. Finally, we demonstrate that amino-acid frequencies within TERM instances can be used to predict changes in the free energy of folding upon single mutations on par with or better than existing methods. Structural biology has benefited greatly from previously observed degeneracies in structure space, particularly on secondary and super-secondary structural levels. The decomposition of the known structural universe into a finite set of compact TERMs offers exciting opportunities towards better understanding, design, and prediction of protein structure. -- *Siria Serrano* *Faculty Assistant* *Aspuru-Guzik Group* *Harvard University **Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology* *12 Oxford St. M 136* *Cambridge, MA 02138* *P:** (617) 496-1716 <%28617%29%20496-1716>** F: **617-496-9411 <617-496-9411>*