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A graphics program for the analysis and display of molecular dynamics trajectories.

The program SCARECROW has been developed to help the molecular modeler to analyze and display the very big and complex data files produced by molecular dynamics programs. The molecular graphics program SCARECROW is written to support the display, animation, and extensive analysis of molecular dynamics trajectories. Using the macro language it is easy to make scripts for video animation and for the automated display and analysis of time series. Extensive coloring and atom selection commands are included to help the user to focus on relevant regions of the molecule. Time series can be produced and viewed on the screen or transferred to other programs.

Chemical Phenomena

Optimal control for the active above-knee prosthesis.

Control of an active above-knee prosthesis has been simulated for a selected gait activity using a hierarchical closed-loop method. An extension of finite-state control, referred to as artificial reflex control, was adopted at the strategic level of control. At the actuator level of control an optimal tracking method, based on dynamic programming, is applied. This deals mainly with the actuator level of control, but considers the interaction of the leg dynamics and the switching effects of artificial reflex control. Optimal tracking at the actuator level of the above-knee prosthesis reduces the on-off effects of finite-state methods, such as artificial reflex control. The proposed method can also be used for the design of prosthetic elements. Specific attention is paid to the limited torque and power in the prosthetic joint actuator, which are imposed by the principle of self-containment in the artificial leg. The hierarchical structure, integrating artificial reflex control and optimal tracking, can be used in real time, as estimated from the number of computer operations required for the suggested method.

Artificial Limbs

Restoring unassisted natural gait to paraplegics via functional neuromuscular stimulation: a computer simulation study.

Functional neuromuscular stimulation (FNS) of paralyzed muscles has enabled spinal-cord-injured patients to regain a semblance of lower-extremity control, for example to ambulate while relying heavily on the use of walkers. Given the limitations of FNS, specifically low muscle strengths, high rates of fatigue, and a limited ability to modulate muscle excitations, it remains unclear, however, whether FNS can be developed as a practical means to control the lower extremity musculature to restore aesthetic, unsupported gait to paraplegics. A computer simulation of FNS-assisted bipedal gait shows that it is difficult, but possible to attain undisturbed, level gait at normal speeds provided the electrically-stimulated ankle plantarflexors exhibit either near-normal strengths or are augmented by an orthosis, and at least seven muscle-groups in each leg are stimulated. A combination of dynamic programming and an open-loop, trial-and-error adjustment process was used to find a suboptimal set of discretely-varying muscle stimulation patterns needed for a 3-D, 8 degree-of-freedom dynamic model to sustain a step. An ankle-foot orthosis was found to be especially useful, as it helped to stabilize the stance leg and simplified the task of controlling the foot during swing. It is believed that the process of simulating natural gait with this model will serve to highlight difficulties to be expected during laboratory and clinical trials.

Computer Simulation

Distal pocket residues affect picosecond ligand recombination in myoglobin. An experimental and molecular dynamics study of position 29 mutants.

Time courses for intramolecular NO and O2 recombination to native and three position 29 mutants of sperm whale myoglobins were measured after laser photolysis on picosecond and nanosecond time scales. The rates for the first phase of NO recombination were 1.8, 2.5, 29, and > or = 100 ns-1 for Ala29, Val29, Leu29 (native), and Phe29 myoglobin, respectively, at room temperature. This order is not correlated with the overall association rate constants for NO binding which were all in the range 20-50 x 10(6) M-1 s-1 and is the opposite of that observed for the rate constants for the overall thermal dissociation of NO which were 5.0, 2.8, 0.98, and 0.21 x 10(-4) s-1 for Ala29, Val29, Leu29 (native), and Phe29 myoglobin, respectively, at 20 degrees C. This inverse correlation suggests that photo- and thermally dissociated ligand molecules experience similar kinetic and equilibrium barriers to rebinding. The larger side chains of Leu29 and Phe29 inhibit rapid movement of the ligand away from the iron atom facilitating geminate recombination. The smaller side chains of Val29 and Ala29 increase the space available to the ligand, decreasing the rate of geminate recombination and enhancing complete dissociation. Diffusion of NO in the distal pocket of myoglobin was simulated using a variant of the molecular dynamics program CHARMM that includes the locally enhanced sampling protocol (Elber, R., and Karplus, M. (1991) J. Am. Chem. Soc. 112, 9161-9175; Roitberg, A., and Elber, R. (1991) J. Chem. Phys. 95, 9277-9287) and the x-ray structures of Carver et al. (Carver, T. E., Brantley, R. E., Jr., Singleton, E. W., Arduini, R. M., Quillin, M. L., Phillips, G. N., Jr., and Olson, J. S. (1992) J. Biol. Chem. 267, 14443-14450). Both accelerated (5,000 K) and room temperature ligands were used, and comparisons were made between simulations with a complete hydration shell surrounding the protein and those with only eight water molecules near the distal histidine. Photodissociated ligands initially move away from the heme plane, past Leu29, and toward Leu32, Phe33, Ile107, and Ile111. These theoretical results confirm that a complete description of picosecond ligand recombination must include the dynamics of ligand movement in the distal portion of the heme pocket.

Animals

Pioneer in Molecular Biology: Conformational Ensembles in Molecular Recognition, Allostery, and Cell Function.

In 1978, for my PhD, I developed the efficient O(n3) dynamic programming algorithm for the-then open problem of RNA secondary structure prediction. This algorithm, now dubbed the "Nussinov algorithm", "Nussinov plots", and "Nussinov diagrams", is still taught across Europe and the U.S. As sequences started coming out in the 1980s, I started seeking genome-encoded functional signals, later becoming a bioinformatics trend. In the early 1990s I transited to proteins, co-developing a powerful computer vision-based docking algorithm. In the late 1990s, I proposed the foundational role of conformational ensembles in molecular recognition and allostery. At the time, conformational ensembles and free energy landscapes were viewed as physical properties of proteins but were not associated with function. The classical view of molecular recognition and binding was based on only two conformations captured by crystallography: open and closed. I proposed that all conformational states preexist. Proteins always have not one folded form-nor two-but many folded forms. Thus, rather than inducing fit, binding can work by shifting the ensembles between states, and this shifting, or redistributing the ensembles to maintain equilibrium, is the origin of the allosteric effect and protein, thus cell, function. This transformative paradigm impacted community views in allosteric drug design, catalysis, and regulation. Dynamic conformational ensemble shifts are now acknowledged as the origin of recognition, allostery, and signaling, underscoring that conformational ensembles-not proteins-are the workhorses of the cell, pioneering the fundamental idea that dynamic ensembles are the driving force behind cellular processes. Nussinov was recognized as pioneer in molecular biology by JMB.

Molecular Biology

Optimizing model: insemination, replacement, seasonal production, and cash flow.

Dynamic programming to solve the Markov decision process problem of optimal insemination and replacement decisions was adapted to address large dairy herd management decision problems in the US. Expected net present values of cow states (151,200) were used to determine the optimal policy. States were specified by class of parity (n = 12), production level (n = 15), month of calving (n = 12), month of lactation (n = 16), and days open (n = 7). Methodology optimized decisions based on net present value of an individual cow and all replacements over a 20-yr decision horizon. Length of decision horizon was chosen to ensure that optimal policies were determined for an infinite planning horizon. Optimization took 286 s of central processing unit time. The final probability transition matrix was determined, in part, by the optimal policy. It was estimated iteratively to determine post-optimization steady state herd structure, milk production, replacement, feed inputs and costs, and resulting cash flow on a calendar month and annual basis if optimal policies were implemented. Implementation of the model included seasonal effects on lactation curve shapes, estrus detection rates, pregnancy rates, milk prices, replacement costs, cull prices, and genetic progress. Other inputs included calf values, values of dietary TDN and CP per kilogram, and discount rate. Stochastic elements included conception (and, thus, subsequent freshening), cow milk production level within herd, and survival. Validation of optimized solutions was by separate simulation model, which implemented policies on a simulated herd and also described herd dynamics during transition to optimized structure.

Animals

The equilibrium partition function and base pair binding probabilities for RNA secondary structure.

A novel application of dynamic programming to the folding problem for RNA enables one to calculate the full equilibrium partition function for secondary structure and the probabilities of various substructures. In particular, both the partition function and the probabilities of all base pairs are computed by a recursive scheme of polynomial order N3 in the sequence length N. The temperature dependence of the partition function gives information about melting behavior for the secondary structure. The pair binding probabilities, the computation of which depends on the partition function, are visually summarized in a "box matrix" display and this provides a useful tool for examining the full ensemble of probable alternative equilibrium structures. The calculation of this ensemble representation allows a proper application and assessment of the predictive power of the secondary structure method, and yields important information on alternatives and intermediates in addition to local information about base pair opening and slippage. The results are illustrated for representative tRNA, 5S RNA, and self-replicating and self-splicing RNA molecules, and allow a direct comparison with enzymatic structure probes. The effect of changes in the thermodynamic parameters on the equilibrium ensemble provides a further sensitivity check to the predictions.

Animals

Solution structures of cyclic and dicyclic analogues of growth hormone releasing factor as determined by two-dimensional NMR and CD spectroscopies and constrained molecular dynamics.

Solution structures were determined for a linear analogue of growth hormone releasing factor (GRF), and cyclic and dicyclic analogues in which the side chains of aspartyl and lysyl residues spaced at positions i-(i + 4) were joined to form a lactam. The four analogues were [Ala15]-GRF-(1-29)-NH2 and its cyclo8-12, cyclo21-25, and dicyclo8-12;21-25 derivatives. The peptides were studied in two solvent systems: 75% methanol/25% water at pH 6.0; and 100% water at pH 3.0. CD spectroscopy was used to assess the overall alpha-helical content. Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy was used to determine the structures in more detail. Nearly complete proton resonance assignments were made for each of the peptides, in both solvents. Nuclear Overhauser effects were converted into distance constraints and applied in the molecular dynamics program CHARMM to evaluate the range of low-energy structures that satisfied the nmr data. In 75% methanol, all of the peptides are comprised of a single alpha-helical segment with fraying of one to three residues at each end. The linear analogue has a tendency to kink. In water, the analogues have two helical segments with flexible regions between them and at the termini of the peptides. The linear analogue is helical at residues 7-14 and 21-28. In the cyclo8-12 analogue, the N-terminal helical region extends to include residues 7-19, while the other helical region is slightly shortened. In the cyclo21-25 analogue, the C-terminal helical region is extended to include residues 19-28, while the N-terminal helical region is destabilized. The dicyclic analogue has the largest N-terminal helix, spanning residues 7-20, but its helical segment at residues 21-28 is not well ordered. All of the analogues exhibit substantial biological activity. The cyclic and dicyclic analogues show dramatically increased resistance to degradation during incubation with human plasma. The i-(i + 4) lactam, therefore, appears to be a synthetic means of stabilizing a local alpha-helical conformation, which may be of general use in the design of active, stable peptides.

Amino Acid Sequence

Fast structure alignment for protein databank searching.

A fast method is described for searching and analyzing the protein structure databank. It uses secondary structure followed by residue matching to compare protein structures and is developed from a previous structural alignment method based on dynamic programming. Linear representations of secondary structures are derived and their features compared to identify equivalent elements in two proteins. The secondary structure alignment then constrains the residue alignment, which compares only residues within aligned secondary structures and with similar buried areas and torsional angles. The initial secondary structure alignment improves accuracy and provides a means of filtering out unrelated proteins before the slower residue alignment stage. It is possible to search or sort the protein structure databank very quickly using just secondary structure comparisons. A search through 720 structures with a probe protein of 10 secondary structures required 1.7 CPU hours on a Sun 4/280. Alternatively, combined secondary structure and residue alignments, with a cutoff on the secondary structure score to remove pairs of unrelated proteins from further analysis, took 10.1 CPU hours. The method was applied in searches on different classes of proteins and to cluster a subset of the databank into structurally related groups. Relationships were consistent with known families of protein structure.

Amino Acid Sequence

Optimal checking procedures for monitoring laboratory analyses.

Many clinical, environmental, and epidemiologic studies rely heavily upon biochemical data, and the quality of these data is of paramount importance to the validity of study conclusions. Traditionally, far more attention has been given to the analysis of study data than has been given to monitoring the quality of the data. In this paper we draw an analogy between monitoring a laboratory system and an industrial production process and discuss the limitations of industrial quality control plans when applied in a laboratory setting. We derive methods for computing optimal checking schedules for laboratory analyses. These schedules formalize traditional laboratory practices of periodic checking and provide guidelines for the frequency and placement of checks within a finite batch of analyses. When laboratory system failure can be reasonably approximated by an exponential or geometric distribution, optimal checking schedules are relatively easy to compute. For more complex failure distributions, we present a dynamic programming approach. We describe an application to the measurement of selenium status in plasma samples using an electrothermal atomic absorption spectrophotometry procedure.

Algorithms

Frequency of insertion-deletion, transversion, and transition in the evolution of 5S ribosomal RNA.

The problem of choosing an alignment of two or more nucleotide sequences is particularly difficult for nucleic acids, such as 5S ribosomal RNA, which do not code for protein and for which secondary structure is unknown. Given a set of 'costs' for the various types of replacement mutations and for base insertion or deletion, we present a dynamic programming algorithm which finds the optimal (least costly) alignment for a set of N sequences simultaneously, where each sequence is associated with one of the N tips of a given evolutionary tree. Concurrently, protosequences are constructed corresponding to the ancestral nodes of the tree. A version of this algorithm, modified to be computationally feasible, is implemented to align the sequences of 5S RNA from nine organisms. Complete sets of alignments and protosequence reconstructions are done for a large number of different configurations of mutation costs. Examination of the family of curbes of total replacements inferred versus the ratio of transitions/transversions inferred, each curve corresponding to a given number of insertions-deletions inferred, provides a method for estimating relative costs and relative frequencies for these different types of mutations.

Base Sequence

A fast unbiased comparison of protein structures by means of the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm.

A fast dynamic programming algorithm for the spatial superposition of protein structure without prior knowledge of an initial alignment has been developed. The program was applied to serine proteases, hemoglobins, cytochromes C, small copper-binding proteins, and lysozymes. In most cases the existing structural homology could be detected in a completely unbiased way. The results of the method presented are in general agreement with other studies. Applying our method, the different alignment results obtained by other authors for serine proteases and cytochromes C can be classified in terms of different alignment parameters such as gap penalties or cut-off length. Limitations of the method are discussed.

Algorithms

Knowledge-based system for the three-dimensional reconstruction of blood vessels from two angiographic projections.

A knowledge-based system for the three-dimensional reconstruction of blood vessels from wide-angle coronary and stereoscopic cerebral angiographic projections is developed. For the reconstruction of the coronary vessels, the left coronary artery (LCA) is automatically labelled on standard RAO and LAO projections, using anatomical models of the LCA. The labelling system succeeds in giving the most important coronary arteries a correct anatomical label. These labelling results enable us to find corresponding segments in both images. In the case of the reconstruction of the cerebral vessels however, such an anatomical model is clearly unavailable. To find corresponding segments, small-angle projections must be relied on, resulting in very similar images. Owing to the small angular separation between both projections, the three-dimensional reconstruction will be less accurate. Once the corresponding segments in both projections are obtained, the three-dimensional artery trajectory is reconstructed with dynamic programming techniques. The three-dimensional reconstructed coronary vessels are also used for an automatic quantification of stenotic lesions.

Blood Vessels

Segmentation, modelling and reconstruction of arterial bifurcations in digital angiography.

The paper presents a method to model an arterial bifurcation from a pair of X-ray angiographic images. It is the initial step of a reconstruction process aiming at detecting and quantifying abnormal sites located on bifurcations. The method proposed consists of two steps. First, each image is independently segmented to extract the vessels in the images. The algorithm uses dynamic programming first to find the bifurcation centrelines from the original images, and secondly to extract vessel edges from the morphological gradient images, under a constraint of parallelism with the previously detected centrelines. Then, a three-dimensional bifurcation model is built by adapting cylinders around the three-dimensional bifurcation centrelines. These cylinders are obtained as a stack of binary orientable ellipses fitted to the projection densities in the corresponding cross-sections. Results obtained on simulated data, phantom and femoral bifurcations are displayed.

Angiography, Digital Subtraction

A local algorithm for DNA sequence alignment with inversions.

A dynamic programming algorithm to find all optimal alignments of DNA subsequences is described. The alignments use not only substitutions, insertions and deletions of nucleotides but also inversions (reversed complements) of substrings of the sequences. The inversion alignments themselves contain substitutions, insertions and deletions of nucleotides. We study the problem of alignment with non-intersecting inversions. To provide a computationally efficient algorithm we restrict candidate inversions to the K highest scoring inversions. An algorithm to find the J best non-intersecting alignments with inversions is also described. The new algorithm is applied to the regions of mitochondrial DNA of Drosophila yakuba and mouse coding for URF6 and cytochrome b and the inversion of the URF6 gene is found. The open problem of intersecting inversions is discussed.

Algorithms

An O (N2 log N) restriction map comparison and search algorithm.

We present an O (R log P) time, O (M+P2) space algorithm for searching a restriction map with M sites for the best matches to a shorter map with P sites, where R, the number of matching site pairs, is bounded by MP. As first proposed by Waterman et al. (1984, Nucl. Acids Res. 12, 237-242) the objective function used to score matches is additive in the number of unaligned sites and the discrepancies in the distances between adjacent aligned sites. Our algorithm is basically a sparse dynamic programming computation in which "candidate lists" are used to model the future contribution of all previously computed entries to those yet to be computed. A simple modification to the algorithm computes the distance between two restriction maps with M and N sites, respectively, in O (MN (log M+log N)) time.

Algorithms

Poisson, compound Poisson and process approximations for testing statistical significance in sequence comparisons.

DNA and protein sequence comparisons are performed by a number of computational algorithms. Most of these algorithms search for the alignment of two sequences that optimizes some alignment score. It is an important problem to assess the statistical significance of a given score. In this paper we use newly developed methods for Poisson approximation to derive estimates of the statistical significance of k-word matches on a diagonal of a sequence comparison. We require at least q of the k letters of the words to match where 0 less than q less than or equal to k. The distribution of the number of matches on a diagonal is approximated as well as the distribution of the order statistics of the sizes of clumps of matches on the diagonal. These methods provide an easily computed approximation of the distribution of the longest exact matching word between sequences. The methods are validated using comparisons of vertebrate and E. coli protein sequences. In addition, we compare two HLA class II transplantation antigens by this method and contrast the results with a dynamic programming approach. Several open problems are outlined in the last section.

Algorithms

A parallel computing approach to genetic sequence comparison: the master-worker paradigm with interworker communication.

We have implemented a parallel version of a dynamic programming biological sequence comparison algorithm to study the potential applicability of using parallel computers for genetic sequence comparisons. Our parallel program is built using C-Linda, a machine-independent parallel programming language, and was tested on both a 10 CPU Sequent Symmetry and a 64 CPU Intel Hypercube. C-Linda implements a shared associative memory model, "tuple space," through which multiple processes can communicate and coordinate control. In our master-worker (MW) parallel implementation, a master process creates several worker processes, extracts a test sequence and multiple library sequences from a database and stores them in tuple space. Each worker reads the test sequence and then repeatedly extracts library strings from tuple space, performs pairwise sequence comparison using a local comparison algorithm to generate a similarity score, and returns the similarity scores to tuple space. The master collects the scores from tuple space and identifies the best match over all library sequences. We also implemented a method of global interworker communication to reduce the total search time by stopping those string comparisons that had no chance of improving on the current best match. Comparisons of the total run time, speedup, and efficiency were made for parallel and sequential versions of a basic MW implementation as well as versions with the global abort threshold.

Algorithms