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Chapter 2: Hinge Atlas: relating<br />

protein sequence to sites of<br />

structural flexibility<br />

Overview<br />

In this chapter, published in BioMedCentral: Bioinformatics, we begin investigating<br />

structural flexility, with a study of the relationship between sequence features and hinges<br />

between structural domains. Some of the tools presented in Chapter 1, especially the new<br />

interactive Morph page and the GO classifications, will be used to aid the work. The<br />

concept of structural flexibility is important for identifying domain boundaries,<br />

understanding structure-function relationships, and designing flexibility into<br />

proteins. Efforts in this field have been hampered by the lack of a proper dataset for<br />

studying characteristics of hinges. Using the Molecular Motions Database we have<br />

created a Hinge Atlas of manually annotated hinges and a statistical formalism for<br />

calculating the enrichment of various types of residues in these hinges. We found various<br />

correlations between hinges and sequence features. Some of these are expected; for<br />

instance, we found that hinges tend to occur on the surface and in coils and turns and to<br />

be enriched with small and hydrophilic residues. Others are less obvious and intuitive. In<br />

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