PEP-FOLD4: a pH-dependent force field for peptide structure prediction in aqueous solution

Authors: Julien Rey, Samuel Murail, Sjoerd de Vries, Philippe Derreumaux, Pierre Tuffery

Published: 2023-05-11

DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkad376

Source: Full article


Abstract

AbstractAccurate and fast structure prediction of peptides of less 40 amino acids in aqueous solution has many biological applications, but their conformations are pH- and salt concentration-dependent. In this work, we present PEP-FOLD4 which goes one step beyond many machine-learning approaches, such as AlphaFold2, TrRosetta and RaptorX. Adding the Debye-Hueckel formalism for charged-charged side chain interactions to a Mie formalism for all intramolecular (backbone and side chain) interactions, PEP-FOLD4, based on a coarse-grained representation of the peptides, performs as well as machine-learning methods on well-structured peptides, but displays significant improvements for poly-charged peptides. PEP-FOLD4 is available at http://bioserv.rpbs.univ-paris-diderot.fr/services/PEP-FOLD4. This server is free and there is no login requirement.