Ramachandran Map
Godfrey Beddard, School of Chemistry, University of Leeds, LS2 3JT UK.
The Ramachandram map is a plot of the phi vs psi torsion angles in a protein and is formed by adding a point at (f, y) for each amino acid residue.The angles range from +-180o.
A torsion angle is defined between two planes, for example as the angle between the two pages of an open book, and in a protein these angles are defined as shown in the figure. The backbone O=C-N(H)Ca and the CaC(=O)NH atoms are each in a plane (shown shaded) and the angle y is that between the planes containing the Ca and N atoms and that containing the C(=O) and N(H) atoms, and f bewtween (O=)CN and CaC(=O) as shown.
Although Ca has only single bonds which are therefore free to rotate, not all psi and phi torsion angles are observed because van der Waals interactions between non-bonded atoms in the backbone, and with atoms in the amino acid residues, R, make large ranges of angles too high in energy to be observed in most proteins. For example, if the oxygen atoms are ingored, and the bond (N-Ca) (angle f ) is rotated the two carbon atoms eventually reach a cis conformation rather than the trans shown above. They are now relatively close to one another and because of the mutual repulsion of their electrons this conformation may not be allowed and is sterically forbidden.
The main secondary structures of proteins are the a-helix and b-sheet. Alpha helices are found in the region bouded approximately by (f) phi = -60 +/- 10 , (y) psi = -45 +/- 10 , and b-sheets in the region phi = -45 to -150, psi = 100 to 180.
Ramachandran maps (also called plots) are described in most textbook dealing with protiens, see Branden & Tooze, 'Introduction to Protein Science', publ Garland Publishing 1991, or Finkelstein and Ptitsyn, 'Protein Physics', publ Academic Press, 2002. See Davis et al. Proteins vol, 50 p 437, 2003 for a more sophisticated method of calculating forbidden regions. Calculating torsion angles and general properties of vectors are described in Beddard, 'Applying Maths in the Chemical and Biosciences, an example based approach', publ OUP, 2009.
To use this programmme
(1) Download some data from the RCSB Protein data bank http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/home/home.do (2) The input is all of pdb file just as downloaded (3) Put the data in the same folder as this document and finally add the .pdb name to the list as shown below. Some examples are shown
The output is (1) Torsion angles. This option can be disabled at the printf statements which are placed just before plotting. (2) Ramachandran graphs produced are
(a) all residues, (b) glycines only , (c) prolines only and (d) pre-prolines only
Superimposed on the maps are grey lines to indicate the (approximate) sterically allowed areas.