Extracting representative structures from protein conformational ensembles

A large number of methods generate conformational ensembles of biomolecules. Often one structure is selected to be representative of the whole ensemble, usually by clustering and selecting the structure closest to the center of the most populated cluster. We find that this structure is not necessarily the best representation of the cluster and present here two computationally inexpensive averaging protocols that can systematically provide better representations of the system, which can be more directly compared with structures from X-ray crystallography. In practice, systematic errors in the generated conformational ensembles appear to limit the maximum improvement of averaging methods.