Multiple conformations of proteins in native state

Examples of protein sequences that can adopt multiple native states are recently accumulated. Characterization of the protein multiple conformations will have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between structure and function, and their folding kinetics. In present review, the experimental evidence for the existence of multiple conformations in the native state of proteins, the molecular basis and the biological significance of multiple conformations of proteins are focused.     

小蛋白天然结构与折叠速度关系的分子动力学模拟研究

用分子动力学模拟方法研究了小蛋白天然结构集合与其折叠速度的关系．根据蛋白质内存在接触的不同定义方式．利用分子动力学模拟方法得到了10个小蛋白的一系列构象集合,分析了其拓扑参数与折叠速度的关系,并与PDB单构象的情况进行了比较．用含主链重原子的方式定义接触,所计算的结果较好,天然结构集合所计算的拓扑参数与蛋白质折叠速度的关系可以更真实地反映实际情况．     

Probing the free-energy surface for protein folding with single-molecule fluorescence spectroscopy

Protein folding is inherently a heterogeneous process because of the very large number of microscopic pathways that connect the myriad unfolded conformations to the unique conformation of the native structure. In a first step towards the long-range goal of describing the distribution of pathways experimentally, F?rster resonance energy transfer (FRET) has been measured on single, freely diffusing molecules. Here we use this method to determine properties of the free-energy surface for folding that have not been obtained from ensemble experiments. We show that single-molecule FRET measurements of a small cold-shock protein expose equilibrium collapse of the unfolded polypeptide and allow us to calculate limits on the polypeptide reconfiguration time. From these results, limits on the height of the free-energy barrier to folding are obtained that are consistent with a simple statistical mechanical model, but not with the barriers derived from simulations using molecular dynamics. Unlike the activation energy, the free-energy barrier includes the activation entropy and thus has been elusive to experimental determination for any kinetic process in solution.     

从高分子构象与动力学到蛋白质折叠

针对作用在聚合物刷上的键拉力研究表明作用在接枝基面上的力随着聚合物刷接枝密度的增大反而减小,然而尾端单体上的拉伸张力并没有消失.高分子的构象和动力学转变决定了其物性和多种多样的应用,而生物大分子蛋白质作为由二十种不同属性的氨基酸构成的序列,更是具有由其序列所决定的特别的三维自然结构.本文就聚合物刷、聚合物纳米复合材料、聚合物网络等几种高分子体系的构象与动力学过程,及蛋白质构象和其折叠与去折叠的动力学过程做了介绍.特别是蛋白质的折叠与去折叠速率在单分子操纵实验中受到拉力的调控,通过测量这种拉力依赖的动力学过程、蛋白质的自由能曲面和折叠去折叠路径可以得到系统全面的研究.本文以肌肉蛋白titin的免疫球蛋白结构域I27为例对蛋白质折叠研究进行了阐述.     

迷向周期和方法在β-簮结构折褶模拟中的应用

采用新近提出的迷向周期和方法(IPS),结合自导Lang evin动态模拟,模拟研究9余肽折褶成β簮结构的情况,表明了该结构与NMR观察到的基本一致,而Ewald模拟由于是强烈的镜像相互作用会产生构型偏差,获得致密构型的几率增大,表明IPS方法更适合于周期边界条件的模拟.     

Transfer of a beta-turn structure to a new protein context

Four-residue beta-turns and larger loop structures represent a significant fraction of globular protein surfaces and play an important role in determining the conformation and specificity of enzyme active sites and antibody-combining sites. Turns are an attractive starting point to develop protein design methods, as they involve a small number of consecutive residues, adopt a limited number of defined conformations and are minimally constrained by packing interactions with the remainder of the protein. The ability to substitute one beta-turn geometry for another will extend protein engineering beyond the redecoration of fixed backbone conformations to include local restructuring and the repositioning of surface side chains. To determine the feasibility and to examine the effect of such a structural modification on the fold and thermodynamic stability of a globular protein, we have substituted a five-residue turn sequence from concanavalin A for a type I' beta-turn in staphylococcal nuclease. The resulting hybrid protein is folded and has full nuclease enzymatic activity but reduced thermodynamic stability. The crystal structure of the hybrid protein reveals that the guest turn sequence retains the conformation of the parent concanavalin A structure when substituted in the nuclease host.     

Crystal structure of the intensely sweet protein monellin

Two unusual proteins, discovered in African berries, possess the interesting property of having a very high specificity for the sweet receptors. These proteins, monellin and thaumatin, are approximately 100,000 times sweeter than sugar on a molar basis and several thousand times sweeter on a weight basis. Neither contains carbohydrates or modified amino acids. Several interesting observations have been made about the two proteins: native conformations are important for the sweet taste, although both proteins are intensely sweet, there are no statistically significant sequence similarities between them; and despite the absence of sequence similarity, antibodies against thaumatin compete for monellin (as well as many other sweet compounds, but not for chemically modified non-sweet monellin) and vice versa. To understand the structural basis of these observations we determined the crystal structure of thaumatin, and report here the structure of monellin at 3 A resolution. Monellin consists of two peptide chains, the A chain of 44 residues and the B chain of 50 residues. We find no similarity between the backbone structure of monellin and that of thaumatin.     

Kinetic redistribution of native and misfolded RNAs by a DEAD-box chaperone

DExD/H-box proteins are ubiquitously involved in RNA-mediated processes and use ATP to accelerate conformational changes in RNA. However, their mechanisms of action, and what determines which RNA species are targeted, are not well understood. Here we show that the DExD/H-box protein CYT-19, a general RNA chaperone, mediates ATP-dependent unfolding of both the native conformation and a long-lived misfolded conformation of a group I catalytic RNA with efficiencies that depend on the stabilities of the RNA species but not on specific structural features. CYT-19 then allows the RNA to refold, changing the distribution from equilibrium to kinetic control. Because misfolding is favoured kinetically, conditions that allow unfolding of the native RNA yield large increases in the population of misfolded species. Our results suggest that DExD/H-box proteins act with sufficient breadth and efficiency to allow structured RNAs to populate a wider range of conformations than would be present at equilibrium. Thus, RNAs may face selective pressure to stabilize their active conformations relative to inactive ones to avoid significant redistribution by DExD/H-box proteins. Conversely, RNAs whose functions depend on forming multiple conformations may rely on DExD/H-box proteins to increase the populations of less stable conformations, thereby increasing their overall efficiencies.     

A pre-existing hydrophobic collapse in the unfolded state of an ultrafast folding protein

Insights into the conformational passage of a polypeptide chain across its free energy landscape have come from the judicious combination of experimental studies and computer simulations. Even though some unfolded and partially folded proteins are now known to possess biological function or to be involved in aggregation phenomena associated with disease states, experimentally derived atomic-level information on these structures remains sparse as a result of conformational heterogeneity and dynamics. Here we present a technique that can provide such information. Using a 'Trp-cage' miniprotein known as TC5b (ref. 5), we report photochemically induced dynamic nuclear polarization NMR pulse-labelling experiments that involve rapid in situ protein refolding. These experiments allow dipolar cross-relaxation with hyperpolarized aromatic side chain nuclei in the unfolded state to be identified and quantified in the resulting folded-state spectrum. We find that there is residual structure due to hydrophobic collapse in the unfolded state of this small protein, with strong inter-residue contacts between side chains that are relatively distant from one another in the native state. Prior structuring, even with the formation of non-native rather than native contacts, may be a feature associated with fast folding events in proteins.     

Structure of antibody hypervariable loops reproduced by a conformational search algorithm

The antigen-combining site of antibody molecules consists of six separate loops supported by a conserved beta-sheet framework; antibody specificity arises from length and sequence variation of these 'hypervariable' loops and can be manipulated by transferring sets of loops between different frameworks. Irregular loops are the most difficult parts of protein structure to understand and to model correctly. Here, we describe two computer experiments where all the hypervariable loops were deleted from X-ray structures of mouse immunoglobulins and reconstructed using the conformational search program CONGEN. A protocol was developed for reconstruction of the hypervariable loops in McPC 603 antibody. Calculated loop conformations were generated and a model of the combining site was built from selected low-energy conformations. We then modelled hypervariable loops in another antibody molecule, HyHEL-5. Both models agreed well with the known crystal structures. Our results hold out promise for the success of future modelling studies of complete antigen-combining sites from amino acid sequences.     

Effect of protein packing structure on side-chain methyl rotor conformations

Protein molecules undergo a series of conformational fluctuations ranging in degree from atomic vibrations to transient denaturation, even in physiological conditions. The rotational motions of amino acid side chains form an important subset of the types of fluctuation a protein can undergo. NMR and molecular dynamics have shown that methyl groups in proteins are not held in fixed positions, but spin rapidly around their rotor axes. The question then arises as to whether methyl groups in proteins predominantly adopt the 'staggered' conformation, favoured by the intrinsic barrier to rotation of these groups, or whether cooperative packing effects in the folded protein perturb the average configurations to higher torsional energy. We report here an investigation of the rotational conformations of the methyl groups of aliphatic side chains in the protein crambin by neutron diffraction. We find that in the time-averaged structure of this protein, the majority of methyl rotors adopt the staggered conformation. This is consistent with rotation being a quantized event consisting of rapid reorientations of approximately 120 degrees steps to positions of highest stability. The fact that the local environment does not dictate the low energy state of methyl groups suggests that within the seemingly close-packed interior structure of a protein, mutual packing accommodation occurs as a consequence of the inherent flexibility and small packing defects in protein structures.     

Multiple conformations of a protein demonstrated by magnetization transfer NMR spectroscopy

It is generally accepted that a globular protein in its native state adopts a single, well-defined conformation. However, there have been several reports that some proteins may exist in more than one distinct folded form in equilibrium. In the case of staphylococcal nuclease, evidence for multiple conformations has come from electrophoretic and NMR studies, although there has been some controversy as to whether these are actually interconvertible forms of the same molecular species. Recently, magnetization transfer (MT)-NMR has been developed as a means of studying the kinetics of conformational transitions in proteins. In the study reported here, this approach has been extended and used to demonstrate the presence of at least two native forms of nuclease in equilibrium and to study their interconversion with the unfolded state under the conditions of the thermal unfolding transition. The experiments reveal that two distinct native forms of the protein fold and unfold independently and that these can interconvert directly as well as via the unfolded state. The spectra of the different forms suggest that they are structurally similar but the MT experiments show that the kinetics of folding and unfolding are quite different. Characterization of this behaviour will, therefore, have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between structure and folding kinetics.     

Atom-by-atom analysis of global downhill protein folding

Protein folding is an inherently complex process involving coordination of the intricate networks of weak interactions that stabilize native three-dimensional structures. In the conventional paradigm, simple protein structures are assumed to fold in an all-or-none process that is inaccessible to experiment. Existing experimental methods therefore probe folding mechanisms indirectly. A widely used approach interprets changes in protein stability and/or folding kinetics, induced by engineered mutations, in terms of the structure of the native protein. In addition to limitations in connecting energetics with structure, mutational methods have significant experimental uncertainties and are unable to map complex networks of interactions. In contrast, analytical theory predicts small barriers to folding and the possibility of downhill folding. These theoretical predictions have been confirmed experimentally in recent years, including the observation of global downhill folding. However, a key remaining question is whether downhill folding can indeed lead to the high-resolution analysis of protein folding processes. Here we show, with the use of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), that the downhill protein BBL from Escherichia coli unfolds atom by atom starting from a defined three-dimensional structure. Thermal unfolding data on 158 backbone and side-chain protons out of a total of 204 provide a detailed view of the structural events during folding. This view confirms the statistical nature of folding, and exposes the interplay between hydrogen bonding, hydrophobic forces, backbone conformation and side-chain entropy. From the data we also obtain a map of the interaction network in this protein, which reveals the source of folding cooperativity. Our approach can be extended to other proteins with marginal barriers (less than 3RT), providing a new tool for the study of protein folding.     

Efficient and reproducible folding simulations of the Trp-cage protein with multiscale molecular dynamics

Folding simulations are often time-consuming or highly sensitive to the initial conformation of the simulation even for mini protein like the Trp-cage. Here, we present a multiscale molecular dynamics method which appears to be both efficient and insensitive to the starting conformation based on the testing results from the Trp-cage protein. In this method the simulated system is simultaneously mod- eled on atoms and coarse-grained particles with incremental coarsening levels. The dynamics of coarse-grained particles are adapted to the recent trajectories of finer-grained particles instead of fixed and parameterized energy functions as used in previous coarse-grained models. In addition, the compositions of coarse-grained particles are allowed to be updated automatically based on the coherence during its history. Starting from the fully extended conformation and other several different conformations of the Trp-cage protein, our method successfully finds out the native-like conformations of the Trp-cage protein in the largest cluster of the trajectories in all of the eight performed simulations within at most 10 ns simulation time. The results show that approaches based on multiscale modeling are promising for ab initio protein structure prediction.     

Computer simulation of protein folding.

A new and very simple representation of protein conformations has been used together with energy minimisation and thermalisation to simulate protein folding. Under certain conditions, the method succeeds in "renaturing" bovine pancreatic trypsin inhibitor from an open-chain conformation into a folded conformation close to that of the native molecule.     

Conformational variations in an infectious protein determine prion strain differences

A remarkable feature of prion biology is the strain phenomenon wherein prion particles apparently composed of the same protein lead to phenotypically distinct transmissible states. To reconcile the existence of strains with the 'protein-only' hypothesis of prion transmission, it has been proposed that a single protein can misfold into multiple distinct infectious forms, one for each different strain. Several studies have found correlations between strain phenotypes and conformations of prion particles; however, whether such differences cause or are simply a secondary manifestation of prion strains remains unclear, largely due to the difficulty of creating infectious material from pure protein. Here we report a high-efficiency protocol for infecting yeast with the [PSI+] prion using amyloids composed of a recombinant Sup35 fragment (Sup-NM). Using thermal stability and electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy, we demonstrate that Sup-NM amyloids formed at different temperatures adopt distinct, stably propagating conformations. Infection of yeast with these different amyloid conformations leads to different [PSI+] strains. These results establish that Sup-NM adopts an infectious conformation before entering the cell--fulfilling a key prediction of the prion hypothesis--and directly demonstrate that differences in the conformation of the infectious protein determine prion strain variation.     

Three key residues form a critical contact network in a protein folding transition state

Determining how a protein folds is a central problem in structural biology. The rate of folding of many proteins is determined by the transition state, so that a knowledge of its structure is essential for understanding the protein folding reaction. Here we use mutation measurements--which determine the role of individual residues in stabilizing the transition state--as restraints in a Monte Carlo sampling procedure to determine the ensemble of structures that make up the transition state. We apply this approach to the experimental data for the 98-residue protein acylphosphatase, and obtain a transition-state ensemble with the native-state topology and an average root-mean-square deviation of 6 A from the native structure. Although about 20 residues with small positional fluctuations form the structural core of this transition state, the native-like contact network of only three of these residues is sufficient to determine the overall fold of the protein. This result reveals how a nucleation mechanism involving a small number of key residues can lead to folding of a polypeptide chain to its unique native-state structure.     

Relationships of mRNA-protein secondary structures in the human β-globin gene HBB and four variants

Single nucleotide polymorphism is an interesting problem that can alter gene expression,recode amino acids and affect protein function.Protein structural changes have generally been attributed to amino acid replacements,and only a few research efforts have examined the effects of mRNA structural changes to the conformation of the corresponding protein coded by the mRNA.In the present study,the human β-globin HBB gene and four variants were examined.The mRNA secondary structures were constructed using the dynamic extended folding method and the encoded protein secondary structures were obtained from related databases.Comparisons were performed between these structures before and after mutations were introduced into the mature mRNAs and the proteins.We focused on the structural changes from mRNA to protein and found that regular protein conformations tend to match stable mRNA regions,whereas irregular protein conformations,such as β/γ turns and random coils,often match unstable mRNA regions.Mutations within unstable regions can alter the mRNA secondary structure and leave footprints in the protein structure.Comparison of the mRNA-protein secondary structure relationships represents a potential strategy to explore protein functional changes.     

A mutant T4 lysozyme displays five different crystal conformations

Phage T4 lysozyme consists of two domains between which is formed the active-site cleft of the enzyme. The crystallographically determined thermal displacement parameters for the protein suggested that the amino terminal of the two domains undergoes 'hinge-bending' motion about an axis passing through the waist of the molecule. Such conformational mobility may be important in allowing access of substrates to the active site of the enzyme. We report here a crystallographic study of a mutant T4 lysozyme which demonstrates further the conformational flexibility of the protein. A mutant form of the enzyme with a methionine residue (Met 6) replaced by isoleucine crystallizes with four independent molecules in the crystal lattice. These four molecules have distinctly different conformations. The mutant protein can also crystallize in standard form with a structure very similar to the wild-type protein. Thus the mutant protein can adopt five different crystal conformations. The isoleucine for methionine substitution at the intersection of the two domains of T4 lysozyme apparently enhances the hinge-bending motion presumed to occur in the wild-type protein, without significantly affecting the catalytic activity or thermal stability of the protein.