Documentation created 20 February 2019 by Jason W. Labonte and Vikram K. Mulligan (vmulligan@flationinstitute.org).
PackerPalettes are used by a PackerTask to determine which ResidueTypes may be substituted at any given position in a Pose before any TaskOperations are applied.
The PackerTask can be thought of as an ice sculpture. By default, every position is able to packed and design, but only by the 20 natural amino acid residues. By using TaskOperations, a set of chisels, one can limit packing/design to only certain residues or to only packing. As with ice, once a TaskOperation has chipped away (restricted) a particular residue type, that type cannot be put back by a subsequent TaskOperation (re-enabled for design).
An ice sculpture, of course, is limited by the size of the starting piece of ice. If you want a bigger starting list, or palette, of residues with which you can design, you use a PackerPalette. The DefaultPackerPalette, which provides the 20 canonical amino acid building-blocks, is like an ice cube, but if you use a modifiable PackerPalette, to which you can add more exotic residue types, you can start with an iceberg.
Note that, for most canonical design applications, you will want only the 20 canonical amino acids in your palette. For this, the DefaultPackerPalette suffices, and so this is the PackerPalette that Rosetta uses in all cases automatically unless explicitly overridden by the user. (That is, if you are happy with the 20 canonical amino acids as a palette for design, you need not do anything.)
The PackerPalettes currently available are:
DefaultPackerPalette
This PackerPalette recreates the original packing and design system in Rosetta, before some of us went and mucked around with things by adding crazy chemistries that are not amino acids. If you do not specify a PackerPalette, the DefaultPackerPalette will be selected automatically.
-include_sugars option is on)NCAADefaultPackerPalette
This PackerPalette enables design on common non-canonical backbone types that have a set of 'canonical-like' analogues. For example, beta-3-amino acids have a canonical set of (about) twenty, as do oligoureas and peptoids. It's natural to start with a universe of roughly that size when designing those scaffolds. Pass the flag -packing:packer_palette:NCAA_expanded to activate this palette. Note that property-matching will severely restrict the types available at particular positions. (For example, the PackerPalette behavior that only designs alpha amino acids at alpha AA positions would exclude all these crazy types by default.)
BETA_AA residues in the database (we haven't yet added anything ridiculous that we would seriously mind enabling by default)ARAMID residues in the database (we haven't yet added anything ridiculous that we would seriously mind enabling by default)OLIGOUREA residues in the database (we haven't yet added anything ridiculous that we would seriously mind enabling by default)NoDesignPackerPalette
In situtations in which one wishes to repack a Pose without designing anything, it is always possible to use a DefaultPackerPalette with a PreventRepacking TaskOperation. Under the hood, though, this is slightly inefficient: Rosetta populates a list of the 20 canonical amino acids, then discards all but the current amino acid at a given position. Where efficiency is an issue (e.g. if packer setup is going to occur many thousands of times in rapid succession) you can instead restrict the palette of allowed residue types to the current residue type at each position in a Pose using a NoDesignPackerPalette. This PackerPalette has no user-configurable options.
CustomBaseTypePackerPalette
This PackerPalette includes all of the residues found in the DefaultPackerPalette but includes the ability to add a custom list of base (that is non-variant) ResidueTypes. (As an example, "ALA" is a base type, while "NtermProteinFull" is a variant type -- a modification of ALA or other base types.)
In the future, there may be additional PackerPalettes allowing for design with variant types, or possibly for design of alternative backbones (e.g. a protein nucleic acid residue in place of an RNA residue).
The main method used for interacting with CustomBaseTypePackerPalette is add_type( <ResidueType name> ), which takes the full ResidueType name, (not necessarily its three-letter code,) as a string.
Once the palette is established, it can either be given to a TaskFactory (preferred) or used directly in the construction of a PackerTask (not recommended).
from pyrosetta.rosetta.core.pack.palette import CustomBaseTypePackerPalette
## (Create pose here.)
##### Designing with one extra noncanonical (adamantine): #####
# 1. Create the PackerPalette and add an extra noncanonical type to the allowed types:
pp = CustomBaseTypePackerPalette() ## Only needed for noncanonical design
pp.add_type( "adamantine" ) ## Only needed for noncanonical design
# 2. Create the task factory and set its PackerPalette:
tf = TaskFactory()
tf.set_packer_palette(pp) ## Only needed for noncanonical design
# 3. Pass the task factory to the PackRotamersMover, and pack normally:
packer = PackRotamersMover()
packer.task_factory(tf)
packer.apply(pose)The Python example above translates almost directly into C++.
#include <core/pack/palette/CustomBaseTypePackerPalette.hh>
#include <core/pack/task/TaskFactory.hh>
#include <protocols/minimization_packing/PackRotamersMover.hh>
using namespace core::pack::palette;
using namespace core::pack::task;
using namespace protocols::minimization_packing;
// (Create pose here).
/***** Designing with one extra noncanonical (adamantine): *****/
// 1. Create the PackerPalette and add an extra noncanonical type to the allowed types:
CustomBaseTypePackerPaletteOP pp( utility::pointer::make_shared< CustomBaseTypePackerPalette > ); // Only needed for noncanonical design
pp->add_type( "adamantine" ) // Only needed for noncanonical design
// 2. Create the task factory and set its PackerPalette:
TaskFactory OP tf( utility::pointer::make_shared< TaskFactory > );
tf->set_packer_palette(pp) // Only needed for noncanonical design
// 3. Pass the task factory to the PackRotamersMover, and pack normally:
PackRotamersMover packer;
packer.task_factory(tf)
packer.apply(pose)
In RosettaScripts, the interface with PackerPalette is through the <PACKER_PALETTES> XML tag.
name parameter of a PackerPalette is for providing a unique name to represent a given palette elsewhere in the script.additional_residue_types is for providing the full ResidueType name, (not necessarily its three-letter code,) as a string.The PackerPalette can be directly passed to a PackRotamersMover, or to any other RosettaScripts-scriptable object that takes TaskOperations, by using its packer_palette parameter.
<ROSETTASCRIPTS>
<SCOREFXNS>
</SCOREFXNS>
<RESIDUE_SELECTORS>
</RESIDUE_SELECTORS>
<PACKER_PALETTES>
<CustomBaseTypePackerPalette name="custom_palette" additional_residue_types="adamantine" />
</PACKER_PALETTES>
<TASKOPERATIONS>
</TASKOPERATIONS>
<FILTERS>
</FILTERS>
<MOVERS>
<PackRotamersMover name="design_test" packer_palette="custom_palette" />
</MOVERS>
<PROTOCOLS>
<Add mover="design_test" />
</PROTOCOLS>
<OUTPUT />
</ROSETTASCRIPTS>By default, if a user does not specify a PackerPalette, Rosetta creates a DefaultPackerPalette for all packing tasks. The global default PackerPalette can be changed to a CustomBaseTypePackerPalette, however, using the -packer_palette:extra_base_type_file <filename> command-line flag. The provided file should be an ASCII text file containing a whitespace-separated list of residue type names (not 3-letter codes) that will be appended to the canonical 20 amino acids to form the palette of residue types with which to design. For example, when using the Rosetta fixbb application to design, one can specify design with the 20 canonical amino acids plus the 19 mirror-image D-amino acid counterparts of the L-amino acids using the following command at the commandline:
<path to rosetta>/Rosetta/main/source/src/fixbb.default.linuxgccrelease -packer_palette:extra_base_type_file d_amino_acids.txt <...other flags...>In the above, "default.linuxgccrelease" must be replaced with the appropriate string for your operating system, compiler, compilation settings, and compilation mode. The file d_amino_acids.txt would look like this:
DALA DCYS DASP DGLU DPHE DHIS DILE DLYS DLEU DMET DASN DPRO DGLN DARG DSER DTHR DVAL DTRP DTYRIn earlier versions of Rosetta, when the PackerPalette did not exist, special TaskOperations, which violated the idea of commutativity, had to be employed.
For example, before PackerPalettes existed, Rosetta's resfiles (which allow users to apply a series of TaskOperations in a position-specific manner using a concise, simple syntax) could contain the commands RESET (which discarded the effects of past TaskOperations and reset the allowed amino acids at a position to the 20 canonical amino acids), NC (which would add residue types to the allowed set at a position), and EMPTY (which would discard all allowed residue types at a position, including those added with NC). These violated TaskOperation commutativity (the property that a set of TaskOperations applied in any order produce the same effect). Now, these operations are prohibited. Users instead must turn on whatever exotic building blocks that they want with a PackerPalette, and can then turn them off with resfiles or other TaskOperations (the convention that has always existed for canonical design). In the above example, of designing with the 20 canonical amino acids plus the D-amino acid mirror-images, one could prohibit all residue types except for D- or L-alanine at position 5 with the following resfile:
start
5 A PIKAA AX[DALA]