Youdong Mao

Zhaolong Wu, Shuwen Zhang, Wei Li Wang et al.

The 2.5-MDa 26S proteasome maintains proteostasis and regulates myriad cellular processes. How polyubiquitylated substrate interactions regulate proteasome activity is not understood. Here we introduce a deep manifold learning framework, named AlphaCryo4D, which enables atomic-level cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) reconstructions of nonequilibrium conformational continuum and reconstitutes hidden dynamics of proteasome autoregulation in the act of substrate degradation. AlphaCryo4D integrates 3D deep residual learning with manifold embedding of free-energy landscapes, which directs 3D clustering via an energy-based particle-voting algorithm. In blind assessments using simulated heterogeneous cryo-EM datasets, AlphaCryo4D achieved 3D classification accuracy three times that of conventional method and reconstructed continuous conformational changes of a 130-kDa protein at sub-3-angstrom resolution. By using AlphaCryo4D to analyze a single experimental cryo-EM dataset, we identified 64 conformers of the substrate-bound human 26S proteasome, revealing conformational entanglement of two regulatory particles in the doubly capped holoenzymes and their energetic differences with singly capped ones. Novel ubiquitin-binding sites are discovered on the RPN2, RPN10 and Alpha5 subunits to remodel polyubiquitin chains for deubiquitylation and recycle. Importantly, AlphaCryo4D choreographs single-nucleotide-exchange dynamics of proteasomal AAA-ATPase motor during translocation initiation, which upregulates proteolytic activity by allosterically promoting nucleophilic attack. Our systemic analysis illuminates a grand hierarchical allostery for proteasome autoregulation.

Jiayi Wu, Yong-Bei Ma, Charles Congdon et al.

Motivation: Structural heterogeneity in single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) data represents a major challenge for high-resolution structure determination. Unsupervised classification may serve as the first step in the assessment of structural heterogeneity. Traditional algorithms for unsupervised classification, such as K-means clustering and maximum likelihood optimization, may classify images into wrong classes with decreasing signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) in the image data, yet demand increased cost in computation. Overcoming these limitations requires further development on clustering algorithms for high-performance cryo-EM data analysis. Results: Here we introduce a statistical manifold learning algorithm for unsupervised single-particle deep clustering. We show that statistical manifold learning improves classification accuracy by about 40% in the absence of input references for lower SNR data. Applications to several experimental datasets suggest that our deep clustering approach can detect subtle structural difference among classes. Through code optimization over the Intel high-performance computing (HPC) processors, our software implementation can generate thousands of reference-free class averages within several hours from hundreds of thousands of single-particle cryo-EM images, which allows significant improvement in ab initio 3D reconstruction resolution and quality. Our approach has been successfully applied in several structural determination projects. We expect that it provides a powerful computational tool in analyzing highly heterogeneous structural data and assisting in computational purification of single-particle datasets for high-resolution reconstruction.