Improving Protein Structure Prediction Using Integrative Cryo-EM and Ion Mobility Mass Spectrometry Modeling

Abstract

Proteins perform essential roles across nearly all cellular processes, and accurate three-dimensional structures remain critical for elucidating structure-function relationships and studies on drug discovery. Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), X-ray crystallography, and nuclear magnetic resonance can provide detailed structural information. However, for many proteins, structural information is available only as lower-resolution experimental data or sparse data. Such information is more difficult to translate into accurate atomic coordinates; a common example is low-resolution cryo-EM density maps. In parallel, mass spectrometry-based methods, including ion mobility (IM-MS), offer rapid, broadly applicable structural descriptors such as collisional cross section (CCS), a global measure of molecular shape and size, but CCS values also do not provide atomistic detail. Here we present CRIM (cryo-EM + IM-MS), an integrative Rosetta scoring function that combines low-resolution cryo-EM density information with IM-MS derived CCS as restraints to improve monomeric protein structure prediction. CRIM incorporates the Rosetta REF2015 (RS) energy with a CCS agreement penalty (computed via PARCS) and an electron-density agreement term (elec_dens_fast). We tested CRIM on an ideal dataset of 60 monomeric proteins using simulated CCS values and density maps. Across the ideal dataset, the CRIM score function improved or maintained prediction quality for many targets, reducing the mean RMSD from 3.65 [A] (RS) to 2.90 [A] and increasing the mean TM-score from 0.88 to 0.90. Furthermore, an experimental benchmark dataset of 54 proteins was curated to include either experimental cryo-EM maps or published CCS values. On the experimental dataset, CRIM similarly improved model selection, lowering the mean RMSD from 6.65 [A] to 4.38 [A] and raising the mean TM-score from 0.73 to 0.79. In comparison to AlphaFold3 predictions, CRIM frequently yielded competitive predictions and was able to substantially outperform AlphaFold3 for select difficult targets where sparse experimental restraints provide strong discriminatory power. The CRIM score function is freely available within the Rosetta software suite and provides a practical framework for leveraging complementary IM-MS and cryo-EM data to improve monomeric protein structure prediction.