On Thursday 15 July 2010, Huw Jenkins wrote: > Hi, > > I am currently refining some reasonably high (1.4-1.6 Å) resolution > protein:RNA complex structures and was trying the approach described in > Schwartz et al. Nat. Struct. Biol. 8 (2001) 761-765 where they divided each > nucleotide into three TLS groups – the ribose, the phosphorus atom plus both > nonesterified oxygens and the base.
Aside from issues of describing the groups at all, I would not recommend this as a refinement protocol. The number of atoms in each group is too small for TLS refinement to be well-behaved in the absence of additional restraints that the current generation of programs (refmac, phenix.refine) does not implement. It is in principle an attractive idea to treat at least the planar bases as individual TLS groups, but I have not had the time or opportunity to explore this in practice. Ideally, one might like to try constraining the group so that the glycosyl bond defined the libration axis (see for instance the section on ADP representations in the Newsletter that Pavel Afonine posted recently). Unfortunately again this is not implemented in current refinement programs. My gut feeling is that the best TLS description would be each base (or base pair) in its own group, the use TLSMD to analyse and assign groups for the backbone atoms. But again I have no actual experience with this, so it's only a suggestion. Ethan Just as an aside: The B factors in the PDB file 1j75, which I think corresponds to the paper you cite, are very far from reasonable. I would not use this structure as an example of success in choosing a refinement protocol for ADPs. Although I also note that it is possible the B factors archived in the PDB file have become mangled during deposition of the output from a non-standard protocol. > When I define a tlsin file that does this with the ribose, P OP1 and OP2, and > base from 3 successive nucleotides everything seems to work fine so the > groups are defined correctly. However when I divide a single nucleotide into > 3 TLS groups only the first group has its origin calculated and actually has > TLS parameters refined: > > > TLS origin for group 1 -3.1622999 -6.9280601 -9.6330261 > > TLS origin for group 2 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 > > TLS origin for group 3 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 > > > TLS group 1: > > T tensor ( 1) = 0.046 0.115 0.103 -0.003 -0.008 0.087 > L tensor ( 1) = 1.341 1.887 5.684 0.509 -2.040 -0.436 > S tensor ( 1) = 0.015 0.015 -0.257 -0.220 -0.024 0.071 0.095 > 0.060 > > TLS group 2: > > T tensor ( 2) = 0.031 0.031 0.031 0.000 0.000 0.000 > L tensor ( 2) = 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 > S tensor ( 2) = 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 > 0.000 > > TLS group 3: > > T tensor ( 3) = 0.031 0.031 0.031 0.000 0.000 0.000 > L tensor ( 3) = 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 > S tensor ( 3) = 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 > 0.000 > > > An excerpt from my tlsin is below: > > TLS > RANGE 'B 3.' 'B 3.' P > RANGE 'B 3.' 'B 3.' O1P > RANGE 'B 3.' 'B 3.' O2P > > TLS > RANGE 'B 3.' 'B 3.' C1* > RANGE 'B 3.' 'B 3.' C2* > RANGE 'B 3.' 'B 3.' C3* > RANGE 'B 3.' 'B 3.' C4* > RANGE 'B 3.' 'B 3.' C5* > RANGE 'B 3.' 'B 3.' O2* > RANGE 'B 3.' 'B 3.' O3* > RANGE 'B 3.' 'B 3.' O4* > > > TLS > RANGE 'B 3.' 'B 3.' N1 > RANGE 'B 3.' 'B 3.' C2 > RANGE 'B 3.' 'B 3.' O2 > RANGE 'B 3.' 'B 3.' N3 > RANGE 'B 3.' 'B 3.' C4 > RANGE 'B 3.' 'B 3.' O4 > RANGE 'B 3.' 'B 3.' C5 > RANGE 'B 3.' 'B 3.' C6 > > I guess I've got the syntax of the tlsin file wrong? Any suggestions for > what's wrong would be much appreciated! > > Thanks, > > > Huw > > > > -- > Dr Huw Jenkins > Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology > University of Leeds >