Inspired by origami diagrams I’ve made a scheme for SH2 protein domain.
Origami instructions often include a crease pattern — an unfolded model showing all creases of initial piece of paper. As an equivalent of crease pattern for protein I depicted its contact map — 2D matrix representation of residue-residue contacts.
However, modern approaches to protein structure prediction do not resemble step-by-step folding with origami schemes. Methods, designed to reproduce process of folding in their prediction, lose in speed and accuracy to those, utilizing evolutionary data and information extracted from available pool of resolved protein structures.
Process. Firstly, I rendered the SH2 domain structure (PDB ID: 1LKK) using UCSF Chimera and generated its contact map with nanoHUB. Then I applied Photoshop filters to protein structure to create folded paper effect, added grid and text to contact map, pasted SH2 description from wiki in en and jp. It also took some time to google and check captions in Japanese. Source of inspiration.
SH2 protein domain origami scheme
Source images