Abstract
Lydia Tapia, Shawna Thomas, Nancy M. Amato, "Using Dimensionality Reduction to Better Capture RNA and Protein Folding Motions," Technical Report, TR08-005, Parasol Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, U.S.A., Oct 2008.
Technical Report(ps, pdf, abstract)
Molecular motions, including both protein and RNA, play an
essential role in many biochemical processes. Simulations have
attempted to study these detailed large-scale molecular motions, but
they are often limited by the expense of representing complex
molecular structures. For example, enumerating all possible RNA
conformations with valid contacts is an exponential endeavor, and the
complexity of protein motion increases with the model's detail and
protein length.
In this paper, we explore the use of dimensionality reduction
techniques to better approximate protein and RNA motions. We present
two new methods to study motions: (1) an evaluation technique to
compare different distributions of conformations and (2) a way to
identify likely local motion transitions. We combine these two
methods in an existing motion framework to study large-scale motions
for both proteins and RNA. We show that dimensionality reduction can
be effectively applied, even to discrete conformation spaces (as for
RNA secondary structure) that do not typically lend themselves to
reduction techniques.