QUILT

Written by Philip Lijnzaad (while at EBI; now at the Princess Maxima Centrum for
Pediatric Oncology (<[email protected]> or <[email protected]>)

Quilt is a program to delineate hydrophobic patches on protein surfaces. For the
description of the algorithm, please quote/refer to

  Lijnzaad, P., Berendsen, H.J.C. and Argos, P. (1996) 
  "A method for detecting hydrophobic patches on the protein surfaces."
  Proteins: Structure, Function, Genetics 26:192-203

For a statistical overview of patches on monomeric proteins, see:

  Lijnzaad, P., Berendsen, H.J.C. and Argos, P. (1996) 
  "Hydrophobic patches on the surfaces of protein structures." 
  Proteins: Structure, Function, Genetics, 25:389-397

For a statistical overview of patches on the interface of obligate oligomeric
proteins, see:

  Lijnzaad, P. and Argos, P. (1997)
  "Hydrophobic patches on protein subunit interfaces: characteristics and prediction."
  Proteins: Structure, Function, Genetics, 28:333-343
  (doi:10.1002/(SICI)1097-0134(199707)28:3<333::AID-PROT4>3.0.CO;2-D)


To apply Quilt to a complete molecular dynamics trajectory of a protein (such
as e.g. produced by GROMACS), be sure to check out the package PatchTrack, as well
as the following paper:

  Lijnzaad, P., Feenstra, K.A., Heringa, J. and Holstege, F.C.P. (2008)
  "On Defining the Dynamics of Hydrophobic Patches on Protein Surfaces"
  Proteins, Structure, Function, Bioinformatics 72: 105-114.


I recently noticed that there now is completely different tool called quilt.
It is software for managing software patches (incremental source code
differences). It has nothing to do with protein structure analysis.

Installing:
----------

See the INSTALL file.  I recently put this thing on github, so
I simplified things a bit. Please fork the project and send me pulll
requests!

PDB files are searched for in the path given enviroment variable PDBPATH,
which can be a colon separated list.

Documentation:
-------------

Currently this README file is the main documentation; along with the
publication it should be enough to get started. Also, be sure to read the
output of `quilt -h'

A list of files contained in this distribution, along with a brief
description, is given in file FILES; this may help a bit as well.

Please note that the package contains a number of un(der)documented features.
Especically the full triangulation routines are not usable in the current
version. 

The directory examples contains the example in- and output of running the
program on lysozym; the shell script in scripts/job is how it was
created. The scripts (and most other stuff) often have a -h option, and/or
are commented fairly extensively.

Parameters:
-----------

See quilt -h and the article. Also see .residues and .atoms for atom
radii. One thing to play with is the polar expansion radius. A reasonable
setting is in the 1.0 - 1.4 range. The larger this value, the smaller but
more prominent the patches will be; smaller values give more disperse
patches, that are larger and may contain the occasional polar atom.

Input:
------
A pdb file, which is searched for in the environment variable PDBPATH. In it,
it searches for 3fxn.brk or 3fxn.brk (alter pdb.h if necessary). The program
can also read a file in the format N\nN * {X Y Z RADIUS\n}, and can also read
DSSP files (see also pdb.h and pdb.c; alter DSSPPATH etc. if necessary).

Output: 
------- 

progress/warnings/errors to STDERR, patches to STDOUT.  The stderr output can
largely be ignored; most warnings are informational or inconsequential.  The
patches, written to STDOUT, are sorted by descending patch size. If
recovering is switched on (-R option), there is first a report on the
correspondence between the rankings  looking like: 

  # new patch ranks, after recovering
  #0: 68 (850.487) WAS #0: 32 (289.169)
  #1: 80 (815.522) WAS #1: 39 (264.779)
  #2: 56 (770.897) WAS #4: 25 (238.075)

is given; you can ignore this. After this, a list of patches is given. Each
patch looks like:

# 2 14 atoms 16 patches 365 points area 198.620 0 bndries ABC 11.638 5.688 1.847
% 599 616 618 831 835 840 844 845 854 855 858 1065 1069 1070 
 G 79 @ CA =3198-;K 81 @ CG =586-;K 81 @ CE =4088-;G 107 @ C =586-;C 108 @ C =111-;
 V 109 @ CA =334-;V 109 @ CG1=3915-;V 109 @ CG2=3269-;V 111 @ CA =389-;V 111 @ C =151-;
 V 111 @ CG1=825-;I 138 @ CA =218-;I 138 @ CG1=2067-;I 138 @ CG2=935-;

All this means the following: patch nr 2 (i.e. 3rd in rank; they start at 0)
consists of 16 atomic faces (the faces used to be called patches, I know this
is confusing!)  on 14 different atoms, totalling 365 sampling points and
having a total area of 198.620 square Angstroms of solvent accessible
surface. There are 0 boundaries (as this is not implemented) and the
semi-axes A,B and C of an 3D ellipsoid fitted to the patch are given in
Angstroms. Then (the lines starting with '% ') follow the atom numbers (the
order in the file; counting starts at 0), followed by the textual atom IDs
which are separated by semi-colons. The first atom of this patch is CA of
Gly79 of chain ' ', having an individual solvent accesible surface area of
31.98 square angstroms (numbers are multiplied by 100), and no ('-')
secondary structure information is available (the program can integrate data
from the DSSP secondary structure assignments, but that's not done for the
test run).

A more formal description would be:

'#' RANK NATOMS NFACES NPOINTS 'area' AREA '0 bndries' 'ABC' A B C 
'%' ATOMNO
A_ACID CHAIN RESIDUENO INSERTION_CODE '@' ATOMNAME '=' AREA*100 SEC.STR. ';'


Example:
--------
A typical way of running things (Bourne shell; see also scripts/job) is:

  quilt  -n 252 -ep 1.4 -R -p 8lyz.pdb -a 8lyz.area > 8lyz.pat 2> 8lyz.log

252 sampling points per atom are used, a polar expansion radius of 1.4
Angstrom is used, and the preliminary patches are recovered after expansion.
The -a option writes a PDB file `8lyz.area' which has the atomic solvent
accessabilty in the fifth field. This is needed for the following.

Randomization:
--------------

To get an idea of the significance of the patches, you need to randomize the
surface, and compare the distribution of patch sizes with the actual one.
First, the actual distribution of patch sizes is histogrammed by extracting
the patch sizes and running them through the perl script `histo' which can be
found in the scripts/ directory:

  awk '/^# [0-9]/{print $10}' 8lyz.pat | histo -l 0 -s 10 > 8lyz.histo

(bins starting at 0, and bin size 10 Angstroms; see histo -h for more
documentation)

Next, you randomize the structure several times. For this you need a pdb file
with atomic solvent accessabilities such as produced with the -a option
(failing to do this will give a wrong hydrophobic surface fraction, resulting
in a bias that makes large real patches look small compared to the randomized
version).  On this file, you run the program N times (say between 20 and 100),
with the -ran option. Output is caught in different files, and an `average
distribution' is made simply by doing a histogram of sizes on all the
randomized files at once:

  for i in `seq 1 100`
  do 
    quilt -ran -n 252 -ep 1.4 -R -p ./8lyz.area > 8lyz.ran$i 2> /dev/null
  done
  
  cat 8lyz.ran[0-9] | awk '/^# [0-9]/{print $10}' | histo -l 0 -s 10 \
    | awk '{print $1, $2/50}' > 8lyz.ranhisto

The results are best viewed as two graphs in the same plot, using a graphical
plot program, e.g. using xmgrace -nxy 8lyz.histo -nxy 8lyz.ranhisto. While
not statistically rigourous, it does show which patches appear to be
unusually large for the given structure.

This whole process, including the randomization, is automated and documented
in scripts/one-structure.sh. 


Results:
--------
The perl script `patresidues' is provided to convert the output patches to
something slightly more readable. Run as

  patresidues < 8lyz.pat > 8lyz.txt

The script Rpatsel produces a little rasmol script for easier viewing; run 
as 

  for i in 0 1 2 3 4 
  do 
    Rpatsel 8lyz.pat $i  
  done > 8lyz.rml

Loading the script 8lyz.rml into Rasmol will define p0 to be patch number 0,
p1 is patch no 1, etc. You can then 'select p2' and color or display it the
way you want. If there are cofactors present, you should rename them as they
have been assigned funny oneletter-codes by the ~/.residue template file;
Rpatsel has a provision for doing this (see Rpatsel -h)

That's about it. I'd be very pleased to hear about any experience, good
or bad, with the programs and scripts that make up the  package. Questions,
comments, bug reports please to [email protected]. Alternatively, just
fork the project and send me pull requests!


								Philip