Evaluation of variability in high resolution protein structures by global distance scoring

Systematic analysis of statistical and dynamical properties of proteins is critical to understanding cellular events. Extraction of biologically relevant information from a set of high-resolution structures is important because it can provide mechanistic details behind the functional properties of protein families, enabling rational comparison between families. Most of the current structure comparisons are pairwise-based, which hampers the global analysis of increasing contents in the Protein Data Bank. Additionally, pairing of protein structures introduces uncertainty with respect to reproducibility because it frequently accompanies other settings for superimposition. This study introduces intramolecular distance scoring, for the analysis of human proteins, for each of which at least several high-resolution are available. We show that the results are comprehensively used to overview advances at the atomic level exploration of each protein and protein family. This method, and the interpretation based on model calculations, provide new criteria for understanding specific and non-specific structure variation in a protein, enabling global comparison of the dynamics among a vast variety of proteins from different species.