Exploring protein-mediated compaction of DNA by coarse-grained simulations and unsupervised learning

Protein-DNA interactions and protein-mediated DNA compaction play key roles in a range of biological processes. The length scales typically involved in DNA bending, bridging, looping, and compaction (≥1 kbp) are challenging to address experimentally or by all-atom molecular dynamics simulations, making coarse-grained simulations a natural approach. Here we present a simple and generic coarse-grained model for the DNA-protein and protein-protein interactions, and investigate the role of the latter in the protein-induced compaction of DNA. Our approach models the DNA as a discrete worm-like chain. The proteins are treated in the grand-canonical ensemble and the protein-DNA binding strength is taken from experimental measurements. Protein-DNA interactions are modeled as an isotropic binding potential with an imposed binding valency, without specific assumptions about the binding geometry. To systematically and quantitatively classify DNA-protein complexes, we present an unsupervised machine learning pipeline that receives a large set of structural order parameters as input, reduces the dimensionality via principal component analysis, and groups the results using a Gaussian mixture model. We apply our method to recent data on the compaction of viral genome-length DNA by HIV integrase and we find that protein-protein interactions are critical to the formation of looped intermediate structures seen experimentally. Our methodology is broadly applicable to DNA-binding proteins and to protein-induced DNA compaction and provides a systematic and quantitative approach for analyzing their mesoscale complexes.