Virtual reality based approach to protein heavy-atom structure reconstruction

A commonly recurring problem in structural protein studies, is the determination of all heavy atom positions from the knowledge of the central alpha-carbon coordinates. We employ advances in virtual reality to address the problem. The outcome is a 3D visualisation based technique where all the heavy backbone and side chain atoms are treated on equal footing, in terms of the C-alpha coordinates. Each heavy atom can be visualised on the surfaces of the different two-spheres, that are centered at the other heavy backbone and side chain atoms. In particular, the rotamers are visible as clusters which display strong dependence on the underlying backbone secondary structure. Our method easily detects those atoms in a crystallographic protein structure which have been been likely misplaced. Our approach forms a basis for the development of a new generation, visualisation based side chain construction, validation and refinement tools. The heavy atom positions are identified in a manner which accounts for the secondary structure environment, leading to improved accuracy over existing methods.