Creation of a Curated Database of Experimentally Determined Human Protein Structures for the Identification of Its Targetome.

Abstract

Assembling an "integrated structural map of the human cell" at atomic resolution will require a complete set of all human protein structures available for interaction with other biomolecules - the human protein structure targetome - and a pipeline of automated tools that allow quantitative analysis of millions of protein-ligand interactions. Toward this goal, we here describe the creation of a curated database of experimentally determined human protein structures. Starting with the sequences of 20,422 human proteins, we selected the most representative structure for each protein (if available) from the protein database (PDB), ranking structures by coverage of sequence by structure, depth (the difference between the final and initial residue number of each chain), resolution, and experimental method used to determine the structure. To enable expansion into an entire human targetome, we docked small molecule ligands to our curated set of protein structures. Using design constraints derived from comparing structure assembly and ligand docking results obtained with challenging protein examples, we here propose to combine this curated database of experimental structures with AlphaFold predictions and multi-domain assembly using DEMO2 in the future. To demonstrate the utility of our curated database in identification of the human protein structure targetome, we used docking with AutoDock Vina and created tools for automated analysis of affinity and binding site locations of the thousands of protein-ligand prediction results. The resulting human targetome, which can be updated and expanded with an evolving curated database and increasing numbers of ligands, is a valuable addition to the growing toolkit of structural bioinformatics.