Protein secondary structure determined from independent and integrated infra-red absorbance and circular dichroism data using the algorithm SELCON

Protein circular dichroism (CD) and infrared absorbance (IR) spectra are widely used to estimate the secondary structure content of proteins in solution. A range of algorithms have been used for CD analysis (SELCON, CONTIN, CDsstr, SOMSpec) and some of these have been applied to IR data, though IR i...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Søren Vrønning Hoffmann, Nykola C. Jones, Alison Rodger
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Cambridge University Press 2025-01-01
Series:QRB Discovery
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S2633289225000043/type/journal_article
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Protein circular dichroism (CD) and infrared absorbance (IR) spectra are widely used to estimate the secondary structure content of proteins in solution. A range of algorithms have been used for CD analysis (SELCON, CONTIN, CDsstr, SOMSpec) and some of these have been applied to IR data, though IR is more commonly analysed by bandfitting or statistical approaches. In this work we provide a Python version of SELCON3 and explore how to combine CD and IR data to best effect. We used CD data in Δε/amino acid residue and scaled the IR spectra to similar magnitudes. Normalising the IR amide I spectra scaled to a maximum absorbance of 15 gives best general performance. Combining CD and IR improves predictions for both helix and sheet by ~2% and helps identify anomalously large errors for high helix proteins such as haemoglobin when using IR data alone and high sheet proteins when using CD data alone.
ISSN:2633-2892