Analysis of Shannon entropy for protein crystallization and prediction of crystallization pH and precipitants

Abstract

This is a new attempt at analysing crystallization data from Protein Data Bank. In line with the idea that crystallization conditions are intimately related with amino acid sequences, we have computed the Shannon entropy of polypeptides and polynucleotides and we have discovered a relationship between Shannon entropy and molecular weight, and also between the entropy of polypeptides, and the precipitants used in crystallization experiments. In fact, the Shannon entropy and the molecular weight of proteins are good precipitant predictors. On the other hand, we have proposed the hypothesis that homologous proteins may have similar crystallization conditions, and we have tried to find evidence that supports it, predicting the crystallization pH of a large amount of polypeptide sequences by means of a nearest neighbour approach combined with local sequence alignment.