STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF CONTACT MAPS

By Michele Vendruscolo, B. Subramanian, I. Kanter, Eytan Domany, J. Lebowitz. 1998

A contact map is a simple representation of the structure of proteins and other chain-like macromolecules. This representation is quite amenable to numerical studies of folding. We show that the number of contact maps corresponding to the possible configurations of a polypeptide chain of N amino acids, represented by (N-1)-step self avoiding walks on a lattice, grows exponentially with N for all dimensions D>1. We carry out exact enumerations in D=2 on the square and triangular lattices for walks of up to 20 steps and investigate various statistical properties of contact maps corresponding to such walks. We also study the exact statistics of contact maps generated by walks on a ladder.

Citations in the corpus

• lDDT: a local superposition-free score for comparing protein structures and models using distance difference tests (2013, neutral): “For small values of the R o parameter, the two types of lDDT scores essentially reduce to a contact map overlap measure (Vendruscolo et al., 1999) and the correlation with global scores such as GDC-all is rather low.”