A novel Empirical Side Chain Orientation Potential for native protein structure discrimination
The development of the technologies such as X-ray and NMR for determining molecular structures let biologists be able to solve three dimensional structures of many protein molecules. These known protein structures have supplied scientists a good knowledge resource for understanding the principle how the primary sequence of a protein folds into a biology functional three dimensional structure. ESCOP aims to develop novel Empirical Side Chain Orientation Potential from known protein structures, and to apply these potentials on protein structure prediction and to understand protein folding. This knowledge-based side chain orientation potential we develpoed here is extremely useful for distinguishing the native-like protein structures from the decoy protein structures. We also explore to combine this global side chain orientation potential with the side chain orientation potential between close residue pairs to increase the power for identifying the native-like protein structures.