Stable conformation of full-length amyloid-β (1–42) monomer in water: Replica exchange molecular dynamics and ab initio molecular orbital simulations

Identification of key stabilizing interactions of amyloid-β oligomers based on fragment molecular orbital calculations on macrocyclic β-hairpin peptides

Analyzing the electronic states and inter-/intra-molecular interactions of amyloid oligomers expand our understanding of the molecular basis of Alzheimer's disease and other amyloid diseases. In the current study, several high-resolution crystal structures of oligomeric assemblies of Aβ-derived peptides have been studied by the ab initio fragment molecular orbital (FMO) method. The FMO method provides comprehensive details of the molecular interactions between the residues of the amyloid oligomers at the quantum mechanical level. Based on the calculations, two sequential aromatic residues (F19 and F20) and negatively charged E22 on the central region of Aβ have been identified as key residues in oligomer stabilization and potential interesting pharmacophores for preventing oligomer formation.

Effects of Metal Ions on Aβ42 Peptide Conformations from Molecular Simulation Studies

In this study, we investigate the conformational characteristics of full-length Aβ₄₂ peptide monomers in the presence of Na⁺ and Zn²⁺ metal ions using atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) simulations with an aim to explore the possible driving forces behind enhanced aggregation rates of the peptides in the presence of salts. The calculations reveal that the presence of metal ions shifts the conformational equilibrium more toward the compact ordered Aβ structures. Such compact ordered structures stabilized by distant nonlocal contacts between two crucial hydrophobic segments, hp1 and hp2, primarily through two important hydrophobic aromatic residues, Phe-19 and Phe-20, are expected to trigger the aggregation process at a faster rate by populating and stabilizing the aggregation prone structures. Formation of a significant number of such distant contacts in the presence of Na⁺ ions has also been found to result in breaking of the N-terminal helix. On the contrary, binding of Zn²⁺ ion to Aβ peptide is highly specific, which stabilizes the N-terminal helix instead of breaking it. This explains why the aggregation rate of Aβ peptides is higher in the presence of divalent Zn²⁺ ions than monovalent Na⁺ ions. Relatively higher overall stability of the most populated Aβ peptide monomers in the presence of Zn²⁺ ions has been found to be associated with specific Zn²⁺-Aβ binding and significant free energy gain.

Fragment Molecular Orbital Calculations with Implicit Solvent Based on the Poisson-Boltzmann Equation: II. Protein and Its Ligand-Binding System Studies

In this study, the electronic properties of bioactive proteins were analyzed using an ab initio fragment molecular orbital (FMO) methodology in solution: coupling with an implicit solvent model based on the Poisson-Boltzmann surface area called as FMO-PBSA. We investigated the solvent effects on practical and heterogeneous targets with uneven exposure to solvents unlike deoxyribonucleic acid analyzed in our recent study. Interfragment interaction energy (IFIE) and its decomposition analyses by FMO-PBSA revealed solvent-screening mechanisms that affect local stability inside ubiquitin protein: the screening suppresses excessiveness in bare charge-charge interactions and enables an intuitive IFIE analysis. The electrostatic character and associated solvation free energy also give consistent results as a whole to previous studies on the explicit solvent model. Moreover, by using the estrogen receptor alpha (ERα) protein bound to ligands, we elucidated the importance of specific interactions that depend on the electric charge and activatability as agonism/antagonism of the ligand while estimating the influences of the implicit solvent on the ligand and helix-12 bindings. The predicted ligand-binding affinities of bioactive compounds to ERα also show a good correlation with their in vitro activities. The FMO-PBSA approach would thus be a promising tool both for biological and pharmaceutical research targeting proteins.

Replica exchange molecular dynamics study of the amyloid beta (11–40) trimer penetrating a membrane

The transmembrane Aβ_11–40 trimer is investigated for the first time using REMD and FEP.

Replica exchange molecular dynamics study of the truncated amyloid beta (11–40) trimer in solution

The structure of the 3Aβ_11–40 oligomer is determined for the first time using T-REMD simulations.

The inverted free energy landscape of an intrinsically disordered peptide by simulations and experiments

The free energy landscape theory has been very successful in rationalizing the folding behaviour of globular proteins, as this representation provides intuitive information on the number of states involved in the folding process, their populations and pathways of interconversion. We extend here this formalism to the case of the Aβ40 peptide, a 40-residue intrinsically disordered protein fragment associated with Alzheimer’s disease. By using an advanced sampling technique that enables free energy calculations to reach convergence also in the case of highly disordered states of proteins, we provide a precise structural characterization of the free energy landscape of this peptide. We find that such landscape has inverted features with respect to those typical of folded proteins. While the global free energy minimum consists of highly disordered structures, higher free energy regions correspond to a large variety of transiently structured conformations with secondary structure elements arranged in several different manners, and are not separated from each other by sizeable free energy barriers. From this peculiar structure of the free energy landscape we predict that this peptide should become more structured and not only more compact, with increasing temperatures, and we show that this is the case through a series of biophysical measurements.