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Melnik TN, Majorina MA, Vorobeva DE, Nagibina GS, Veselova VR, Glukhova KA, Pak MA, Ivankov DN, Uversky VN, Melnik BS. Design of stable circular permutants of the GroEL chaperone apical domain. Cell Commun Signal 2024; 22:90. [PMID: 38303060 PMCID: PMC10836027 DOI: 10.1186/s12964-023-01426-4] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/15/2023] [Accepted: 12/08/2023] [Indexed: 02/03/2024] Open
Abstract
Enhancing protein stability holds paramount significance in biotechnology, therapeutics, and the food industry. Circular permutations offer a distinctive avenue for manipulating protein stability while keeping intra-protein interactions intact. Amidst the creation of circular permutants, determining the optimal placement of the new N- and C-termini stands as a pivotal, albeit largely unexplored, endeavor. In this study, we employed PONDR-FIT's predictions of disorder propensity to guide the design of circular permutants for the GroEL apical domain (residues 191-345). Our underlying hypothesis posited that a higher predicted disorder value would correspond to reduced stability in the circular permutants, owing to the increased likelihood of fluctuations in the novel N- and C-termini. To substantiate this hypothesis, we engineered six circular permutants, positioning glycines within the loops as locations for the new N- and C-termini. We demonstrated the validity of our hypothesis along the set of the designed circular permutants, as supported by measurements of melting temperatures by circular dichroism and differential scanning microcalorimetry. Consequently, we propose a novel computational methodology that rationalizes the design of circular permutants with projected stability. Video Abstract.
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Affiliation(s)
- Tatiana N Melnik
- Institute of Protein Research, Russian Academy of Sciences, Institutskaja Str. 4, Pushchino, Moscow Region, 142290, Russia
| | - Maria A Majorina
- Institute of Protein Research, Russian Academy of Sciences, Institutskaja Str. 4, Pushchino, Moscow Region, 142290, Russia
| | - Daria E Vorobeva
- Institute of Protein Research, Russian Academy of Sciences, Institutskaja Str. 4, Pushchino, Moscow Region, 142290, Russia
| | - Galina S Nagibina
- Institute of Protein Research, Russian Academy of Sciences, Institutskaja Str. 4, Pushchino, Moscow Region, 142290, Russia
| | - Victoria R Veselova
- Institute of Protein Research, Russian Academy of Sciences, Institutskaja Str. 4, Pushchino, Moscow Region, 142290, Russia
| | - Ksenia A Glukhova
- Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Biophysics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Institutskaja Str. 3, Puschino, Moscow Region, 142290, Russia
| | - Marina A Pak
- Center for Molecular and Cellular Biology, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Bolshoy Boulevard 30, Bld. 1, Moscow, 121205, Russia
| | - Dmitry N Ivankov
- Center for Molecular and Cellular Biology, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Bolshoy Boulevard 30, Bld. 1, Moscow, 121205, Russia
| | - Vladimir N Uversky
- Department of Molecular Medicine and USF Health Byrd Alzheimer's Center and Research Institute, Morsani College of Medicine, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA.
- Research Center for Molecular Mechanisms of Aging and Age-Related Diseases, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Dolgoprudny, Russia.
| | - Bogdan S Melnik
- Institute of Protein Research, Russian Academy of Sciences, Institutskaja Str. 4, Pushchino, Moscow Region, 142290, Russia.
- Pushchino Branch, Shemyakin-Ovchinnikov Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences, Prospekt Nauki 6, Pushchino, Moscow Region, 142290, Russia.
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2
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Clifton BE, Kozome D, Laurino P. Efficient Exploration of Sequence Space by Sequence-Guided Protein Engineering and Design. Biochemistry 2023; 62:210-220. [PMID: 35245020 DOI: 10.1021/acs.biochem.1c00757] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 02/02/2023]
Abstract
The rapid growth of sequence databases over the past two decades means that protein engineers faced with optimizing a protein for any given task will often have immediate access to a vast number of related protein sequences. These sequences encode information about the evolutionary history of the protein and the underlying sequence requirements to produce folded, stable, and functional protein variants. Methods that can take advantage of this information are an increasingly important part of the protein engineering tool kit. In this Perspective, we discuss the utility of sequence data in protein engineering and design, focusing on recent advances in three main areas: the use of ancestral sequence reconstruction as an engineering tool to generate thermostable and multifunctional proteins, the use of sequence data to guide engineering of multipoint mutants by structure-based computational protein design, and the use of unlabeled sequence data for unsupervised and semisupervised machine learning, allowing the generation of diverse and functional protein sequences in unexplored regions of sequence space. Altogether, these methods enable the rapid exploration of sequence space within regions enriched with functional proteins and therefore have great potential for accelerating the engineering of stable, functional, and diverse proteins for industrial and biomedical applications.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ben E Clifton
- Protein Engineering and Evolution Unit, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, 1919-1 Tancha, Onna, Okinawa 904-0495, Japan
| | - Dan Kozome
- Protein Engineering and Evolution Unit, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, 1919-1 Tancha, Onna, Okinawa 904-0495, Japan
| | - Paola Laurino
- Protein Engineering and Evolution Unit, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, 1919-1 Tancha, Onna, Okinawa 904-0495, Japan
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Kaczmarski JA, Mahawaththa MC, Feintuch A, Clifton BE, Adams LA, Goldfarb D, Otting G, Jackson CJ. Altered conformational sampling along an evolutionary trajectory changes the catalytic activity of an enzyme. Nat Commun 2020; 11:5945. [PMID: 33230119 PMCID: PMC7683729 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19695-9] [Citation(s) in RCA: 22] [Impact Index Per Article: 5.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/17/2020] [Accepted: 10/21/2020] [Indexed: 02/07/2023] Open
Abstract
Several enzymes are known to have evolved from non-catalytic proteins such as solute-binding proteins (SBPs). Although attention has been focused on how a binding site can evolve to become catalytic, an equally important question is: how do the structural dynamics of a binding protein change as it becomes an efficient enzyme? Here we performed a variety of experiments, including propargyl-DO3A-Gd(III) tagging and double electron-electron resonance (DEER) to study the rigid body protein dynamics of reconstructed evolutionary intermediates to determine how the conformational sampling of a protein changes along an evolutionary trajectory linking an arginine SBP to a cyclohexadienyl dehydratase (CDT). We observed that primitive dehydratases predominantly populate catalytically unproductive conformations that are vestiges of their ancestral SBP function. Non-productive conformational states, including a wide-open state, are frozen out of the conformational landscape via remote mutations, eventually leading to extant CDT that exclusively samples catalytically relevant compact states. These results show that remote mutations can reshape the global conformational landscape of an enzyme as a mechanism for increasing catalytic activity.
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Affiliation(s)
- Joe A Kaczmarski
- Research School of Chemistry, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 2601, Australia
| | - Mithun C Mahawaththa
- Research School of Chemistry, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 2601, Australia
| | - Akiva Feintuch
- Department of Chemical and Biological Physics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, 76100, Israel
| | - Ben E Clifton
- Research School of Chemistry, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 2601, Australia.,Protein Engineering and Evolution Unit, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, 1919-1 Tancha, Onna-son, Okinawa, 904-0412, Japan
| | - Luke A Adams
- Medicinal Chemistry, Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Monash University, Parkville, VIC, 3052, Australia
| | - Daniella Goldfarb
- Department of Chemical and Biological Physics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, 76100, Israel.
| | - Gottfried Otting
- Research School of Chemistry, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 2601, Australia. .,Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Innovations in Peptide and Protein Science, Research School of Chemistry, Australian National University, Canberra, 2601, ACT, Australia.
| | - Colin J Jackson
- Research School of Chemistry, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 2601, Australia. .,Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Innovations in Peptide and Protein Science, Research School of Chemistry, Australian National University, Canberra, 2601, ACT, Australia. .,Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology, Research School of Chemistry, Australian National University, Canberra, 2601, ACT, Australia.
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Smietanska J, Sliwiak J, Gilski M, Dauter Z, Strzalka R, Wolny J, Jaskolski M. A new modulated crystal structure of the ANS complex of the St John's wort Hyp-1 protein with 36 protein molecules in the asymmetric unit of the supercell. Acta Crystallogr D Struct Biol 2020; 76:653-667. [PMID: 32627738 PMCID: PMC7336385 DOI: 10.1107/s2059798320006841] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/27/2020] [Accepted: 05/20/2020] [Indexed: 12/22/2022] Open
Abstract
Superstructure modulation, with violation of the strict short-range periodic order of consecutive crystal unit cells, is well known in small-molecule crystallography but is rarely reported for macromolecular crystals. To date, one modulated macromolecular crystal structure has been successfully determined and refined for a pathogenesis-related class 10 protein from Hypericum perforatum (Hyp-1) crystallized as a complex with 8-anilinonaphthalene-1-sulfonate (ANS) [Sliwiak et al. (2015), Acta Cryst. D71, 829-843]. The commensurate modulation in that case was interpreted in a supercell with sevenfold expansion along c. When crystallized in the additional presence of melatonin, the Hyp-1-ANS complex formed crystals with a different pattern of structure modulation, in which the supercell shows a ninefold expansion of c, manifested in the diffraction pattern by a wave of reflection-intensity modulation with crests at l = 9n and l = 9n ± 4. Despite complicated tetartohedral twinning, the structure has been successfully determined and refined to 2.3 Å resolution using a description in a ninefold-expanded supercell, with 36 independent Hyp-1 chains and 156 ANS ligands populating the three internal (95 ligands) and five interstitial (61 ligands) binding sites. The commensurate superstructures and ligand-binding sites of the two crystal structures are compared, with a discussion of the effect of melatonin on the co-crystallization process.
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Affiliation(s)
- Joanna Smietanska
- Faculty of Physics and Applied Computer Science, AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland
| | - Joanna Sliwiak
- Center for Biocrystallographic Research, Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poznan, Poland
| | - Miroslaw Gilski
- Center for Biocrystallographic Research, Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poznan, Poland
- Department of Crystallography, Faculty of Chemistry, A. Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland
| | - Zbigniew Dauter
- Synchrotron Radiation Research Section, National Cancer Institute, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL 60439, USA
| | - Radoslaw Strzalka
- Faculty of Physics and Applied Computer Science, AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland
| | - Janusz Wolny
- Faculty of Physics and Applied Computer Science, AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland
| | - Mariusz Jaskolski
- Center for Biocrystallographic Research, Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poznan, Poland
- Department of Crystallography, Faculty of Chemistry, A. Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland
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Weinstein J, Khersonsky O, Fleishman SJ. Practically useful protein-design methods combining phylogenetic and atomistic calculations. Curr Opin Struct Biol 2020; 63:58-64. [PMID: 32505941 DOI: 10.1016/j.sbi.2020.04.003] [Citation(s) in RCA: 25] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/12/2020] [Accepted: 04/06/2020] [Indexed: 12/11/2022]
Abstract
Our ability to design new or improved biomolecular activities depends on understanding the sequence-function relationships in proteins. The large size and fold complexity of most proteins, however, obscure these relationships, and protein-optimization methods continue to rely on laborious experimental iterations. Recently, a deeper understanding of the roles of stability-threshold effects and biomolecular epistasis in proteins has led to the development of hybrid methods that combine phylogenetic analysis with atomistic design calculations. These methods enable reliable and even single-step optimization of protein stability, expressibility, and activity in proteins that were considered outside the scope of computational design. Furthermore, ancestral-sequence reconstruction produces insights on missing links in the evolution of enzymes and binders that may be used in protein design. Through the combination of phylogenetic and atomistic calculations, the long-standing goal of general computational methods that can be universally applied to study and optimize proteins finally seems within reach.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jonathan Weinstein
- Department of Biomolecular Sciences, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 7610001, Israel
| | - Olga Khersonsky
- Department of Biomolecular Sciences, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 7610001, Israel.
| | - Sarel J Fleishman
- Department of Biomolecular Sciences, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 7610001, Israel.
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Trudeau DL, Tawfik DS. Protein engineers turned evolutionists-the quest for the optimal starting point. Curr Opin Biotechnol 2019; 60:46-52. [PMID: 30611116 DOI: 10.1016/j.copbio.2018.12.002] [Citation(s) in RCA: 73] [Impact Index Per Article: 14.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/17/2018] [Revised: 11/22/2018] [Accepted: 12/03/2018] [Indexed: 12/12/2022]
Abstract
The advent of laboratory directed evolution yielded a fruitful crosstalk between the disciplines of molecular evolution and bio-engineering. Here, we outline recent developments in both disciplines with respect to how one can identify the best starting points for directed evolution, such that highly efficient and robust tailor-made enzymes can be obtained with minimal optimization. Directed evolution studies have highlighted essential features of engineer-able enzymes: highly stable, mutationally robust enzymes with the capacity to accept a broad range of substrates. Robust, evolvable enzymes can be inferred from the natural sequence record. Broad substrate spectrum relates to conformational plasticity and can also be predicted by phylogenetic analyses and/or by computational design. Overall, an increasingly powerful toolkit is becoming available for identifying optimal starting points including network analyses of enzyme superfamilies and other bioinformatics methods.
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Affiliation(s)
- Devin L Trudeau
- Department of Biomolecular Sciences, Weizmann Institute of Science, 234 Herzl Street, Rehovot 7610001, Israel
| | - Dan S Tawfik
- Department of Biomolecular Sciences, Weizmann Institute of Science, 234 Herzl Street, Rehovot 7610001, Israel.
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Risso VA, Sanchez-Ruiz JM, Ozkan SB. Biotechnological and protein-engineering implications of ancestral protein resurrection. Curr Opin Struct Biol 2018; 51:106-115. [PMID: 29660672 DOI: 10.1016/j.sbi.2018.02.007] [Citation(s) in RCA: 26] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/21/2018] [Revised: 02/18/2018] [Accepted: 02/20/2018] [Indexed: 10/17/2022]
Abstract
Approximations to the sequences of ancestral proteins can be derived from the sequences of their modern descendants. Proteins encoded by such reconstructed sequences can be prepared in the laboratory and subjected to experimental scrutiny. These 'resurrected' ancestral proteins often display remarkable properties, reflecting ancestral adaptations to intra-cellular and extra-cellular environments that differed from the environments hosting modern/extant proteins. Recent experimental and computational work has specifically discussed high stability, substrate and catalytic promiscuity, conformational flexibility/diversity and altered patterns of interaction with other sub-cellular components. In this review, we discuss these remarkable properties as well as recent attempts to explore their biotechnological and protein-engineering potential.
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Affiliation(s)
- Valeria A Risso
- Departamento de Quimica Fisica, Facultad de Ciencias, University of Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain
| | - Jose M Sanchez-Ruiz
- Departamento de Quimica Fisica, Facultad de Ciencias, University of Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain.
| | - S Banu Ozkan
- Department of Physics and Center for Biological Physics, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281, United States.
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