Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences (Feb 2023)

Quantitative comparison of protein-protein interaction interface using physicochemical feature-based descriptors of surface patches

  • Woong-Hee Shin,
  • Woong-Hee Shin,
  • Keiko Kumazawa,
  • Kenichiro Imai,
  • Takatsugu Hirokawa,
  • Takatsugu Hirokawa,
  • Daisuke Kihara,
  • Daisuke Kihara,
  • Daisuke Kihara

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fmolb.2023.1110567
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10

Abstract

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Driving mechanisms of many biological functions in a cell include physical interactions of proteins. As protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are also important in disease development, protein-protein interactions are highlighted in the pharmaceutical industry as possible therapeutic targets in recent years. To understand the variety of protein-protein interactions in a proteome, it is essential to establish a method that can identify similarity and dissimilarity between protein-protein interactions for inferring the binding of similar molecules, including drugs and other proteins. In this study, we developed a novel method, protein-protein interaction-Surfer, which compares and quantifies similarity of local surface regions of protein-protein interactions. protein-protein interaction-Surfer represents a protein-protein interaction surface with overlapping surface patches, each of which is described with a three-dimensional Zernike descriptor (3DZD), a compact mathematical representation of 3D function. 3DZD captures both the 3D shape and physicochemical properties of the protein surface. The performance of protein-protein interaction-Surfer was benchmarked on datasets of protein-protein interactions, where we were able to show that protein-protein interaction-Surfer finds similar potential drug binding regions that do not share sequence and structure similarity. protein-protein interaction-Surfer is available at https://kiharalab.org/ppi-surfer.

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