Fig. 4: Landscapes of possible polyhedral architectures accessible to each flexible building block.
From: Local structural flexibility drives oligomorphism in computationally designed protein assemblies
a, Hypothetical KWOCA architectures can be described by the sum of internal angles between the subunits of the trimer, S (left) and the dihedral angle δ at the interface between neighboring trimers (right). The internal angle between neighboring local threefold symmetry axes, φ, is characteristic of each polyhedral architecture. b, The trimer subunits of KWOCA 18, KWOCA 70 and I32-10 (shown for comparison) differ in S. c, The multiple values of S observed experimentally for KWOCAs 18 and 70, compared to the single values of the perfectly symmetric design models, highlight the flexibility of these proteins. d, The average δ necessary to obtain each architecture is shown. Green and pink ranges highlight the regime in the experimentally observed architectures. The 16-trimer architecture cannot be formed without extreme asymmetry (that is, θ values well beyond the experimentally observed ranges). The dashed lines indicate the δ of the design models for KWOCA 18 (20 trimers) and KWOCA 70 (eight trimers). In both cases, S is outside the range of the experimentally observed architectures.
