Mapping Protein Conformational Landscapes from Crystallographic Drug Fragment Screens

Proteins are dynamic macromolecules. Knowledge of a protein’s thermally accessible conformations is critical to determining important transitions and designing therapeutics. Accessible conformations are highly constrained by a protein’s structure such that concerted structural changes due to external perturbations likely track intrinsic conformational transitions. These transitions can be thought of as paths through a conformational landscape. Crystallographic drug fragment screens are high-throughput perturbation experiments, in which thousands of crystals of a drug target are soaked with small-molecule drug precursors (fragments) and examined for fragment binding, mapping potential drug binding sites on the target protein. Here, we describe an open-source Python package, COnformational LAndscape Visualization (COLAV), to infer conformational landscapes from such large-scale crystallographic perturbation studies. We apply COLAV to drug fragment screens of two medically important systems: protein tyrosine phosphatase 1B (PTP1B), which regulates insulin signaling, and the SARS CoV-2 Main Protease (MPro). With enough fragment-bound structures, we find that such drug screens enable detailed mapping of proteins’ conformational landscapes.