Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access originally published online on May 11, 2009
Nucleic Acids Research 2009 37(Web Server issue):W559-W564; doi:10.1093/nar/gkp359
Nucleic Acids Research, 2009, Vol. 37, No. suppl_2 W559-W564
© 2009 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
SLITHER: a web server for generating contiguous conformations of substrate molecules entering into deep active sites of proteins or migrating through channels in membrane transporters
Po-Hsien Lee1,
Kuei-Ling Kuo2,
Pei-Ying Chu1,
Eric M. Liu2 and
Jung-Hsin Lin1,2,3,*
1Division of Mechanics, Research Center for Applied Sciences, Academia Sinica,2School of Pharmacy, National Taiwan University and 3Institute of Biomedical Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +886 2 2782 3212, ext. 886; Fax: +886 2 2782 3060; Email: jlin{at}ntu.edu.tw;jhlin{at}gate.sinica.edu.tw
Received March 8, 2009. Revised April 19, 2009. Accepted April 23, 2009.
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ABSTRACT
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Many proteins use a long channel to guide the substrate or ligand
molecules into the well-defined active sites for catalytic reactions
or for switching molecular states. In addition, substrates of
membrane transporters can migrate to another side of cellular
compartment by means of certain selective mechanisms. SLITHER
(
http://bioinfo.mc.ntu.edu.tw/slither/or http://slither.rcas.sinica.edu.tw/)
is a web server that can generate contiguous conformations of
a molecule along a curved tunnel inside a protein, and the binding
free energy profile along the predicted channel pathway. SLITHER
adopts an iterative docking scheme, which combines with a puddle-skimming
procedure, i.e. repeatedly elevating the potential energies
of the identified global minima, thereby determines the contiguous
binding modes of substrates inside the protein. In contrast
to some programs that are widely used to determine the geometric
dimensions in the ion channels, SLITHER can be applied to predict
whether a substrate molecule can crawl through an inner channel
or a half-channel of proteins across surmountable energy barriers.
Besides, SLITHER also provides the list of the pore-facing residues,
which can be directly compared with many genetic diseases. Finally,
the adjacent binding poses determined by SLITHER can also be
used for fragment-based drug design.
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INTRODUCTION
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In order to achieve specific recognition or to enhance association
efficiency, many proteins use long- or half-channels to guide
the substrates or ligands into deep catalytic sites or binding
pockets for catalytic reactions or for switching molecular states.
For example, the acetylcholinesterase uses a 20 Å aromatic
gorge (
1) to guide the substrate acetylcholine into the catalytic
triad of this enzyme. The histone deacetylase (HDAC) uses a
14 Å tunnel (
2,
3) to assist the catalysis of the removal
of acetyl groups for the

-amino group of lysine residues of
nucleosomal histones. G-protein coupled receptors used a half-channel
to guide the ligand into a deep binding pocket and thereby change
the molecular states (
4). Membrane transporters generally use
a curved tunnel to migrate substrates into the other side of
the plasma membrane in a selective manner (
5).
Recognizing the significance of channels within the protein structure, various algorithms, e.g. HOLE (6,7) and MOLE (8), have been developed to characterize the geometrical properties of these channels or to determine the pore lining residues (8). Although geometric dimensions may be useful characteristics for channels of ions, most molecular ligands or substrates are distinct from such simple objects. For a given protein structure, one often wonders whether this structure depicts a conducting or non-conducting state for its substrate or ligand, which cannot be directly judged by the pore radius profile. For most molecular substrates or ligands with shapes other than the simple sphere, it is of great interest to see whether and how the substrates or ligands can crawl through the channel by crossing the surmountable barriers. SLITHER is therefore developed to provide the free energy profile along the access channel, the list of pore-lining residues, and the binding poses of the ligand with these residues.
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METHODS
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An iterative docking scheme is employed to generate contiguous
conformations and their corresponding binding free energies
along a curved tunnel inside a protein. The kernel of this scheme
is the docking calculation, and both AutoDock (
9,
10) and MEDock
(
11) have been adopted in this SLITHER web server. In the preparatory
stage the server will generate the energetic grid maps, which
store the potential energies probed by various atom types of
the ligand molecule on the three-dimensional (3D) meshes in
a specific region of the receptor molecule. The potential energy
terms include the van der Waals interactions, hydrogen bond
interactions, electrostatic interactions, and desolvation free
energy. The free energy calculation implemented in AutoDock
3.05 (
9) and AutoDock 4 (
10) is based on semi-empirical formula
derived from multivariate linear regression, using above potential
energy terms and a conformational entropy term. The details
of the free energy formula can be found in the original articles
of AutoDock 3.05 (
9) and AutoDock 4 (
10).
Because the grid map files will limit the search ranges in the docking calculations, it is recommended to assign the grid center and the grid box dimensions with caution. For transmembrane proteins, it is suggested that the grid box cover the entire membrane-embedding region of the protein. Transmembrane regions of a protein can be predicted by, e.g. TMHMM (12). Either the Lamarckian genetic algorithm (LGA) in AutoDock (9) or the evolutionary Gaussian algorithm (EGA) in MEDock (11) is supposed to find out the global minimum of the free energy in the grid space, which is depicted by the location, orientation and conformation of the ligand with the lowest free energy determined by the empirical scoring function. In the iterative docking scheme adopted in our SLITHER server, the energies of the grid maps will be elevated for 5 kcal/mol at the grid points that are within a (2.25 Å)3—cube centered at the ligand atoms, and then a subsequent docking calculation is performed to find out the new global minimum. The users can specify the overlapping parameter, which is the fraction of ligand atoms whose neighboring grid points will be raised. The allowed overlapping parameter is between 0 and 0.8. The overlapping parameter of zero indicates that the ligand atoms between adjacent iterations will not have any spatial overlap. On the other hand, the overlapping parameter of 0.8 indicates that 80% of the ligand atoms can be overlapped with those in the subsequent iteration. It should be stressed that can be overlapped does not mean will be overlapped. The users can also specify the number of iterations to be conducted. Finally, clustering of ligand conformations will be performed. Two ligand conformations will be assigned to the same cluster if the nearest distance of the atoms in these two conformations is <4 Å. After all the ligand conformations have been clustered, the largest cluster is outputted. The ligand conformations of this cluster are also used as the probes to detect the pore facing residues in the receptor. Pore facing residues are those residues whose heavy atoms are within a specified distance of any ligand atom. Finally, the binding free energy profile will be constructed according to the position along the channel pathway.
The core program of SLITHER is written in Perl 5.8.8, while the web interface is written in PHP (5.1.6). Rasmol (http://www.bernstein-plus-sons.com/software/RasMol_2.7.2.1/) was used to generate the animation of ligands slithering in the protein. In addition, user can manipulate the resulting 3D structures interactively with the JmolApplet embedded in the result displaying pages. JmolApplet is the Java applet of Jmol (http://www.jmol.org/), which is an open-source Java viewer for chemical structures in 3D. Gnuplot (http://www.gnuplot.info/) is used to generate the Slithering Energetics plots.
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INPUT, OUTPUT AND OPTIONS
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The input window of the SLITHER web server is shown in
Figure 1.
The channel or half-channel of protein in question needs to
be aligned to the
y-axis, by, e.g. Chimera (
13), and the transformed
coordinates in the PDB format be outputted. AutoDockTools (ADT)
(
14) can then be used to visually specify the coordinates of
the grid center and the dimensions of the grid box. The dimensions
of the grid box should be at least slightly larger than those
of the channel or the half-channel. The default input file format
is the so-called PDBQ format, which is an extension of the PDB
format. In the PDBQ file, all the hydrogen atoms have been added
and the partial charges have been assigned to all the atoms.
The PDBQ file of the ligand molecule can be generated by many
chemical software or web servers, e.g. Dundee's PRODRG server
(
15) (
http://davapc1.bioch.dundee.ac.uk/programs/prodrg/). In
the ligand PDBQ file, the fixed portion of the atoms in the
ligand molecules are grouped into root, from which
rotatable branches sprout. Torsions
are special cases of branches, where the two atoms
at either end of the rotatable bond have only two nearest neighbors.
Different torsional angles on the branches and
torsions will be evaluated according to a simplified
torsional energy function implemented within AutoDock (
9). The
PDBQ file for proteins can be generated by the PDB2PQR (
16)
(
http://agave.wustl.edu/pdb2pqr/) and a simple awk or perl script.
The PDB2PQR server will provide predictions of the protonation
states of the ionizable residues in a protein at a given pH
value. Our SLITHER web server will perform automatic conversion
of the PDB or the PQR format into the PDBQ format, if the users
do not have their preferred procedures for the required conversion.
Our web server also provides the flexible receptor
mode and the relaxed receptor mode to accommodate
the receptor flexibility in the iterative docking scheme. In
the flexible receptor mode, users can select the
residues on which they would like to observe the effect of flexibility,
which is a new feature of AutoDock 4. In the relaxed
receptor mode, users can upload a set of receptor conformations,
either generated from molecular dynamics simulations or other
conformation sampling techniques, and then the iterative docking
scheme in the SLITHER server will be performed on each of these
conformations. This mode can be considered the extended version
of the relaxed complex scheme (
17,
18), in which the protein
flexibility has been accommodated by molecular dynamics simulation
for high resolution drug design. Pore-facing residues will be
listed according to their amino acid sequence. In the relaxed
receptor mode, the consensus pore-facing residues,
i.e. the pore-facing residues that are found in all uploaded
conformations, will be listed.
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RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
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To demonstrate that our SLITHER server can also be used to explain
some human genetic diseases, we chose the human glucose transporter
Glut1 as an example. The homology model of this transporter
(
19) was retrieved from the Protein Databank (PDB ID: 1SUK)
(
20). Some known missense mutations of the well-studied Glut1
deficiency syndrome (
21) can be associated with the pore-facing
residues in the human glucose transporter Glut1. In
Figure 2,
the residues colored in red are the pore-facing residues corresponding
to the missense mutation of GLUT1 related to the Glut1 deficiency
syndrome, while the residues colored in yellow are those related
to the missense mutation but not along the access channel. It
is shown that the known residues responsible for the Glut1 deficiency
syndrome have significant overlaps with the pore-facing residues.
It should be noted that the correlation of these missense mutations
with such pore-facing residues also depends on the homology
modeling methodology and the sequence similarity of the structural
template to Glut1.
Figure 3a is the slab view of the molecular
surface representations of the human glucose transporter Glut1.
The geometry of the access channel is depicted by HOLE.
Figure 3b
is similar to
Figure 3a, but the substrate conformations along
the access channel are generated by SLITHER. Because the structural
template of this human Glut1 homology model is the X-ray crystallographic
structure of glycerol-3-phosphase transporter (GlpT) at the
inward-facing conformation (
22), i.e. its access channel should
be closed from the periplasmic side, it can be seen from the
HOLE plot that the pore radius is only 1 Å at the 31.2
Å position. Our SLITHER free energy profile also indicates
a major barrier peaked at 32.3 Å. Although the geometry
of the channel seems to be a good indicator for the possible
steric barrier for the substrate entrance pathway, the free
energy profile generated by the SLITHER server showed that other
energetic contribution may also play important roles. As depicted
in
Figure 3c and d, the locations of the peaks of the energetic
profiles are not the always correlated with the locations of
the valleys of the pore radius profile. This is understandable
because in the energetic analysis, not only the steric effects
(e.g. van der Waals interactions), is taken into account. Electrostatic
interactions, hydrophobic interactions, cation–

and

–
interactions, among many others, can also contribute to the
binding free energies. Admittedly, the accuracy of current SLITHER
energetic analysis is limited by the scoring functions used
in the iterative docking procedure. On the other hand, it should
also be noted that neither the pore radius profile nor the slither
energetic profile from a single static structure should be considered
the actual free energy profile when a substrate is crawling
through the entrance pathway. It has been gradually established
that at least for some transport protein, e.g. AcrB, the peristaltic
motions are required for allowing the substrates to pass the
channel (
23). The slithering energetic should be considered
a conceptual device to describe the energetic profile for a
given structure. It will be ideal if an ensemble of structures
or trajectories of molecular dynamics can be combined with such
the slithering energetic analysis. The changes of energetic
profiles upon the conformational changes will provide a physical
explanation why some conformational changes are beneficial for
the entrance or exit of substrates.

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Figure 2. Red: the pore-facing residues corresponding to the missense mutation of GLUT1 related to the Glut1 deficiency syndrome. Yellow: residues related to the missense mutation but not along the access channel.
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Figure 3. (a) A slab view of the molecular surface representations of the human glucose transporter. The geometry of the access channel is depicted by HOLE. (b) Similar to (a), but the substrate conformations along the access channel are generated by SLITHER. (a) and (b) were created with DINO (http://www.dino3d.org/). (c) Pore radius profile along the access channel, generated by HOLE. (d) Free energy profile along the access channel, generated by SLITHER.
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With the aid of programs for analyzing protein–ligand
interactions, e.g. LigPlot (
24), MOE (
25), etc. it is possible
to further dissect the types of molecular interactions, e.g.
cation–

,

–

, ionic, van der Waals or hydrophobic
interactions, with the pore-facing residues. Such information
will be useful to explain the mutagenesis data to design new
mutagenesis experiments and also to elucidate the roles of some
single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). On the other hand, the
non-overlapping adjacent low energy binding modes of two identical
molecules or two different molecules can be used to design composite
molecules that are made by linking these two molecules with
appropriate linkers, which is one of the simplest forms of the
fragment-based drug design. The composite compound will generally
exhibit stronger binding affinity than the original individual
compound if the linkers are not too inappropriate.
SLITHER can also be regarded as an extension or an enhanced version of docking programs. Docking programs promise to predict the ligand binding pose with the lowest free energy, usually done with a global optimization algorithm. However, suitable parameters are required for a given algorithm to accurately predict the global minima, and many repeated runs are often necessary for confirming its identification. Since SLITHER is enforced to explore the space other than that occupied by the previously found global minimum, if a lower free energy is found in the subsequent iteration, it indicates that the docking parameters need to be improved. With a proper set of docking parameters, the free energies of different iterations should follow an ascending order.
Finally, we would like to stress that the strength of our SLITHER web site is for ligand or substrate molecules with conformational variability, not for ligands like ions with simple spherical shape. In principle, one could apply rigorous statistical mechanics-based potential of mean force calculations using molecular dynamics simulations with explicit solvent (or also with explicit lipid bilayer) for the free energy profiles of a substrate molecule entering the channel within a protein, but they are typically too time-consuming and computationally demanding, and the convergence of such calculations is always a major concern. Although the scoring function used in the SLITHER web server is of semi-empirical nature, it provides a rapid, alternative route for the qualitative description of the conformational influences on the free energy profiles.
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CONCLUSION
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Our SLITHER web server can be used to predict the free energy
profile along the access channel within a protein, the pore-lining
residues, and the binding poses of the ligand with these residues.
Such information can be used to explain the mutagenesis data,
to design new mutagenesis experiment, and to elucidate the molecular
origins of genetic diseases. This web server can also be used
to perform fragment-base drug design.
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FUNDING
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NSC 95-2112-M-002 -007, 96-2627-B-002-00, 97-2323-B-002-015
and 97-2323-B-077-001. Funding for open access charge: Research
Center for Applied Sciences, Academia Sinica.
Conflict of interest statement. None declared.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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Support from Research Center for Applied Science, Academia Sinica
is greatly acknowledged.
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