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USC-CSCE 769, CU-BIOE 850
Computational Structural Biology
Class location: SWRG 1A20@USC,
Rhodes Eng. Building 422@Clemson
Contact person: Dr. Homayoun Valafar @ USC,
Dr. Martin Laberge @ Clemson
Class meeting time: M,W 2:30-3:45
Office hours: M,W,F 1:00-2:00
Homayoun Valafar
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
3A49 Swearingen Engineering Center
Email: homayoun@cec.sc.edu
803-777-2404(voice)
803-777-3767(fax)
grizzlefarb

CSCE 590F web page

Text and Course Material
Text:
The following are the list of suggested text books:
  1. Structural Bioinformatics, Bourne & Weissig, Wiley-Liss, ISBN 0-471-20199-5
  2. Protein Structure Prediction, Tramontano, Wiley-VCH, ISBN 3-527-31167-X
  3. Protein Bioinformatics, Eidhammer, Jonassen, Taylor, Wiley, ISBN 0-470-84839-1

Course Description:
This course is intended to familiarize interested investigators with theoretical concepts and some subset of the algorithmic tools currently utilized in the field of protein folding such as ROSETTA and I-TASSER. Other software packages such as Xplor-NIH and AMBER that are extensively used by the community of experimental/computational biologists will also be introduced . Upon the completion of this course, participants are expected to be able to embark in competitive research in the area of protein folding.

A number of consecutive assignments are designed to precipitously increase the understanding of each student and utilize their individual strengths. Each student can choose from a variety of possible assignments in order to customize their hands-on experience to suit their future research interests while considering their personal strengths. Finally, each student is expected to complete this course by the submission of a grant application in NIH format (PHS 398) with complete budgetary description as the final project. Competitive grants will be considered for submission to NIH for possible funding.


Resources

Class Discussion Forum
DNA Sequence Databases
Other Databases Software
Scripts
Useful commands and links for Assignments
  • Translation of cDNA sequence
    • ExPASY. You should be able to do most other things here.
  • Sequence Homology
  • Secondary structure prediction
  • Tertiary structure prediction
  • Structure validation
    • ExPASY.  Use Biotech Validation Suite for Protein Structures or PROCHECK. A limited versionof PROCHECK validation can be accessed through the pdb web site here.
    • When using the above site through PDB web, use the NMR option.
    • Most of what is needed for this project can be done manually in MOLMOL as listed below.
      • To add missing atoms such as hydrogen atoms: calcatom "H*"
      • To select bond lenghts: selectbond 'atom1.name="N" and atom2.name="HN"' followed by listselectedbond
      • To observe the Ramachandran space click on Fig and select Ramachandran. Make sure you select the appropriate background.
      • To assess VDW violations click on Calc-VanderWaals, select threshold of 0.0 and plot histogram. Note that before doing this, your entire molecule needs to be selected.
      • To compare the backbone (bb) rmsd between two structures use Options-Dialogs-RMSD function of MolMol. You need to select the same number of residues between the two structures. This function may fail after repeated number of used. Then, quit out of the program and restart or you can use the command line option of the function. To match residues 1-25 of protein 1 and 70-94 of protein 2 you need to type the following two commands:
        • SelectAtom 'bb & (#1:1-25 or #2:70-94)'
        • fit to_first 'selected'
        • rmsd will show on the bottom of the page and the two structures will be superimposed.
        • Note that if one of your structures contains an ensemble of structures, you can just work with the first instance and delete the rest.
  • Functional analysis
    • Establish function based on structural similarity. Do not do this exclusively based on sequence homology. Use DALI to get structurally similar proteins.

Useful Web Tools


Course Outline

The following topics will be  presented :

  • Introduction to biochemistry of amino acids and protein.
  • Introduction to programming in PERL.
  • Introduction to biomolecular visualization tools.
  • Topics in protein structure characterization and classification.
  • Topics in experimental data (NOE and RDC data from NMR).
  • Computational protein folding by force field minimization and constrained optimization.
  • Protein folding based on threading algorithms.
  • Topics in molecular modeling, molecular mechanics and quantum mechanics.
  • Topics in molecular encoders/decoders.
Weekly Schedule
Note: Course contents is subject to change without previous notice.

Tests and Assignments
The grade for this course will be assigned based on the following:
Assignment I
5%
Assignmnet II
10%
Assignmnet III
10%
Assignmnet IV
15%
Midterm Project 25%
Final Project
35%
Letter grades will be assigned based on straight scale unless indicated otherwise.

Assignments:
Date
Assignment
Due Date
1/20/10
Assignment I
1/26/10
2/3/10
Assignment II
2/10/10
2/10/10
Assignment III
2/17/10
2/24/10
Assignment IV
3/1/10
3/1/10
Midterm
3/24/10
3/29/10
Assignment V
3/31/10
3/31/10
Assignment VI
4/9/10
Suggested Reading Assignments:
Date Assigned
Assignment
Completed by
1/11/10
Central Dogma of Modern Biology 1/13/10
1/20/10
Read the following Wikipedia articles: Protein, amino acids
1/25/10
2/1/10 Read:
Stereochemistry of polypeptide chain configurations
RAMACHANDRAN GN, RAMAKRISHNAN C, SASISEKHARAN V
2/8/10
2/1/10 Read:
STEREOCHEMICAL CRITERIA FOR POLYPEPTIDE AND PROTEIN CHAIN CONFORMATIONS II
C. RAMAKRISHNAN and G. N. RAMACHANDRAN
2/8/10
2/8/10
Read:
Levitt, M. and A. Warshel, Computer simulation of protein folding. Nature, 1975. 253: p. 694-698.
2/10/10


Lecture Notes

1/11/10 Introduction to Cell Biology ppt, odp, pdf
1/13/10
Introduction to Molecular Biology, Central Dogma of Modern Biology
ppt, odp, pdf
1/20/10
Introduction or Proteins, Introduction to molecular visualization
ppt, odp, pdf
1/25/10
Biophysics of amino acids, Manipulation of Protein Structure
ppt, odp, pdf
1/27/10
Molecular visualization and manipulation tool
ppt, odp, pdf
2/1/10
Introdection to Physical Forces
ppt, odp, pdf
2/8/10
Ab Initio protein folding
ppt, odp, pdf
2/10/10
Forcefield Optimization
ppt, odp, pdf
2/15/10
Constrained minimiaztion of structures, Intro to Experimental Methods
ppt, odp, pdf
2/17/10
Intorduction to Minimization Techniques
ppt, odp, pdf
2/22/10
Intorcution to Molecular Dynamic Simulation
ppt, odp, pdf
2/24/10
MD Simulation Continued
ppt, odp, pdf
3/1/10
MD simulation, Rotation operators
ppt, odp, pdf
3/3/10
Rotation Operators continue
ppt, odp, pdf
3/22/10
Era of Bioinformatics, Sequence alignment
ppt, odp, pdf
3/24/10
Sequnce and Structure Alignment
1BRF.pdb
1BRF_Modified.pdb
ppt, odp, pdf
3/29/10
Structure Alignment and Structure Mining
ppt, odp, pdf
3/31/10
Structure Determination
ppt, odp, pdf
4/5/10
Current State of Protein Structure Modeling
ppt, odp, pdf
4/12/10
Hybrid approaches to protein folding, nD-PDPA
ppt, odp, pdf


Notices
  • Please complete the following questionnaire
  • Please download Molmol (preferably the Linux version) by 1/20/10
  • 1/13/10: Download site for Molmol has been modified. You can now obtain it for both Windows and ubuntu.