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Osifová Z, Kalvoda T, Galgonek J, Culka M, Vondrášek J, Bouř P, Bednárová L, Andrushchenko V, Dračínský M, Rulíšek L. What are the minimal folding seeds in proteins? Experimental and theoretical assessment of secondary structure propensities of small peptide fragments. Chem Sci 2024; 15:594-608. [PMID: 38179543 PMCID: PMC10763034 DOI: 10.1039/d3sc04960d] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/20/2023] [Accepted: 11/22/2023] [Indexed: 01/06/2024] Open
Abstract
Certain peptide sequences, some of them as short as amino acid triplets, are significantly overpopulated in specific secondary structure motifs in folded protein structures. For example, 74% of the EAM triplet is found in α-helices, and only 3% occurs in the extended parts of proteins (typically β-sheets). In contrast, other triplets (such as VIV and IYI) appear almost exclusively in extended parts (79% and 69%, respectively). In order to determine whether such preferences are structurally encoded in a particular peptide fragment or appear only at the level of a complex protein structure, NMR, VCD, and ECD experiments were carried out on selected tripeptides: EAM (denoted as pro-'α-helical' in proteins), KAM(α), ALA(α), DIC(α), EKF(α), IYI(pro-β-sheet or more generally, pro-extended), and VIV(β), and the reference α-helical CATWEAMEKCK undecapeptide. The experimental data were in very good agreement with extensive quantum mechanical conformational sampling. Altogether, we clearly showed that the pro-helical vs. pro-extended propensities start to emerge already at the level of tripeptides and can be fully developed at longer sequences. We postulate that certain short peptide sequences can be considered minimal "folding seeds". Admittedly, the inherent secondary structure propensity can be overruled by the large intramolecular interaction energies within the folded and compact protein structures. Still, the correlation of experimental and computational data presented herein suggests that the secondary structure propensity should be considered as one of the key factors that may lead to understanding the underlying physico-chemical principles of protein structure and folding from the first principles.
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Affiliation(s)
- Zuzana Osifová
- Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences Flemingovo náměstí 2, 160 00, Praha 6 Czech Republic
- Department of Organic Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Charles University Hlavova 2030 Prague 128 00 Czech Republic
| | - Tadeáš Kalvoda
- Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences Flemingovo náměstí 2, 160 00, Praha 6 Czech Republic
| | - Jakub Galgonek
- Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences Flemingovo náměstí 2, 160 00, Praha 6 Czech Republic
| | - Martin Culka
- Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences Flemingovo náměstí 2, 160 00, Praha 6 Czech Republic
| | - Jiří Vondrášek
- Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences Flemingovo náměstí 2, 160 00, Praha 6 Czech Republic
| | - Petr Bouř
- Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences Flemingovo náměstí 2, 160 00, Praha 6 Czech Republic
| | - Lucie Bednárová
- Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences Flemingovo náměstí 2, 160 00, Praha 6 Czech Republic
| | - Valery Andrushchenko
- Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences Flemingovo náměstí 2, 160 00, Praha 6 Czech Republic
| | - Martin Dračínský
- Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences Flemingovo náměstí 2, 160 00, Praha 6 Czech Republic
| | - Lubomír Rulíšek
- Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences Flemingovo náměstí 2, 160 00, Praha 6 Czech Republic
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Schweitzer-Stenner R. The relevance of short peptides for an understanding of unfolded and intrinsically disordered proteins. Phys Chem Chem Phys 2023; 25:11908-11933. [PMID: 37096579 DOI: 10.1039/d3cp00483j] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 04/26/2023]
Abstract
Over the last thirty years the unfolded state of proteins has attracted considerable interest owing to the discovery of intrinsically disordered proteins which perform a plethora of functions despite resembling unfolded proteins to a significant extent. Research on both, unfolded and disordered proteins has revealed that their conformational properties can deviate locally from random coil behavior. In this context results from work on short oligopeptides suggest that individual amino acid residues sample the sterically allowed fraction of the Ramachandran plot to a different extent. Alanine has been found to exhibit a peculiarity in that it has a very high propensity for adopting polyproline II like conformations. This Perspectives article reviews work on short peptides aimed at exploring the Ramachandran distributions of amino acid residues in different contexts with experimental and computational means. Based on the thus provided overview the article discussed to what extent short peptides can serve as tools for exploring unfolded and disordered proteins and as benchmarks for the development of a molecular dynamics force field.
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O'Neill N, Lima TA, Ferreira FF, Thursch L, Alvarez N, Schweitzer-Stenner R. Forbidden Secondary Structures Found in Gel-Forming Fibrils of Glycylphenylalanylglycine. J Phys Chem B 2022; 126:8080-8093. [PMID: 36194765 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcb.2c05010] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/28/2022]
Abstract
The zwitterionic l-tripeptide glycylphenylalanylglycine self-assembles into very long crystalline fibrils in an aqueous solution, which causes the formation of an exceptionally strong gel phase (G' ∼ 5 × 106 Pa). The Rietveld refinement analysis of its powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD) pattern reveals a unit cell with four peptides forming a P212121 space group and adopting an inverse polyproline II conformation, that is, a right-handed helical structure that occupies the "forbidden" region of the Ramachandran plot. This unusual structure is stabilized by a plethora of intermolecular interactions facilitated by the large number of different functional groups of the unblocked tripeptide. Comparisons of simulated and experimental Fourier transform infrared and vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) amide I' profiles corroborate the PXRD structure. Our experimental setup reduces the sample to a quasi-two-dimensional network of fibrils. We exploited the influence of this reduced dimensionality on the amide I VCD to identify the main fibril axis. We demonstrate that PXRD, vibrational spectroscopy, and amide I simulations provide a powerful toolset for secondary structure and fibril axis determination.
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Affiliation(s)
- Nichole O'Neill
- Department of Chemistry, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania19104, United States.,Department of Chemical Engineering, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania19104, United States
| | - Thamires A Lima
- Department of Chemical Engineering, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania19104, United States
| | - Fabio Furlan Ferreira
- Center for Natural and Human Sciences (CCNH), Federal University of ABC (UFABC), Av. Dos Estados, 5001, S622-3, Santo André, São Paulo09210-580, Brazil
| | - Lavenia Thursch
- Department of Chemical Engineering, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania19104, United States
| | - Nicolas Alvarez
- Department of Chemical Engineering, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania19104, United States
| | - Reinhard Schweitzer-Stenner
- Department of Chemistry, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania19104, United States
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Andrews B, Guerra J, Schweitzer-Stenner R, Urbanc B. Do molecular dynamics force fields accurately model Ramachandran distributions of amino acid residues in water? Phys Chem Chem Phys 2022; 24:3259-3279. [PMID: 35048087 DOI: 10.1039/d1cp05069a] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/22/2023]
Abstract
Molecular dynamics (MD) is a powerful tool for studying intrinsically disordered proteins, however, its reliability depends on the accuracy of the force field. We assess Amber ff19SB, Amber ff14SB, OPLS-AA/M, and CHARMM36m with respect to their capacity to capture intrinsic conformational dynamics of 14 guest residues x (=G, A, L, V, I, F, Y, DP, EP, R, C, N, S, T) in GxG peptides in water. The MD-derived Ramachandran distribution of each guest residue is used to calculate 5 J-coupling constants and amide I' band profiles to facilitate a comparison to spectroscopic data through reduced χ2 functions. We show that the Gaussian model, optimized to best fit the experimental data, outperforms all MD force fields by an order of magnitude. The weaknesses of the MD force fields are: (i) insufficient variability of the polyproline II (pPII) population among the guest residues; (ii) oversampling of antiparallel at the expense of transitional β-strand region; (iii) inadequate sampling of turn-forming conformations for ionizable and polar residues; and (iv) insufficient guest residue-specificity of the Ramachandran distributions. Whereas Amber ff19SB performs worse than the other three force fields with respect to χ2 values, it accounts for residue-specific pPII content better than the other three force fields. Additional testing of residue-specific RSFF1 and Amber ff14SB combined with TIP4P/2005 on six guest residues x (=A, I, F, DP, R, S) reveals that residue specificity derived from protein coil libraries or an improved water model alone do not result in significantly lower χ2 values.
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Affiliation(s)
- Brian Andrews
- Department of Physics, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
| | - Jose Guerra
- Department of Chemistry, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, USA
| | | | - Brigita Urbanc
- Department of Physics, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
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Glycine in Water Favors the Polyproline II State. Biomolecules 2020; 10:biom10081121. [PMID: 32751224 PMCID: PMC7463814 DOI: 10.3390/biom10081121] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/23/2020] [Revised: 07/22/2020] [Accepted: 07/27/2020] [Indexed: 01/09/2023] Open
Abstract
Conformational preferences of amino acid residues in water are determined by the backbone and side-chain properties. Alanine is known for its high polyproline II (pPII) propensity. The question of relative contributions of the backbone and side chain to the conformational preferences of alanine and other amino acid residues in water is not fully resolved. Because glycine lacks a heavy-atom side chain, glycine-based peptides can be used to examine to which extent the backbone properties affect the conformational space. Here, we use published spectroscopic data for the central glycine residue of cationic triglycine in water to demonstrate that its conformational space is dominated by the pPII state. We assess three commonly used molecular dynamics (MD) force fields with respect to their ability to capture the conformational preferences of the central glycine residue in triglycine. We show that pPII is the mesostate that enables the functional backbone groups of the central residue to form the most hydrogen bonds with water. Our results indicate that the pPII propensity of the central glycine in GGG is comparable to that of alanine in GAG, implying that the water-backbone hydrogen bonding is responsible for the high pPII content of these residues.
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Culka M, Galgonek J, Vymětal J, Vondrášek J, Rulíšek L. Toward Ab Initio Protein Folding: Inherent Secondary Structure Propensity of Short Peptides from the Bioinformatics and Quantum-Chemical Perspective. J Phys Chem B 2019; 123:1215-1227. [PMID: 30645123 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcb.8b09245] [Citation(s) in RCA: 12] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/11/2022]
Abstract
By combining bioinformatics with quantum-chemical calculations, we attempt to address quantitatively some of the physical principles underlying protein folding. The former allowed us to identify tripeptide sequences in existing protein three-dimensional structures with a strong preference for either helical or extended structure. The selected representatives of pro-helical and pro-extended sequences were converted into "isolated" tripeptides-capped at N- and C-termini-and these were subjected to an extensive conformational sampling and geometry optimization (typically thousands to tens of thousands of conformers for each tripeptide). For each conformer, the QM(DFT-D3)/COSMO-RS free-energy value was then calculated, Gconf(solv). The Δ Gconf(solv) is expected to provide an objective, unbiased, and quantitatively accurate measure of the conformational preference of the particular tripeptide sequence. It has been shown that irrespective of the helical vs extended preferences of the selected tripeptide sequences in context of the protein, most of the low-energy conformers of isolated tripeptides prefer the R-helical structure. Nevertheless, pro-helical tripeptides show slightly stronger helix preference than their pro-extended counterparts. Furthermore, when the sampling is repeated in the presence of a partner tripeptide to mimic the situation in a β-sheet, pro-extended tripeptides (exemplified by the VIV) show a larger free-energy benefit than pro-helical tripeptides (exemplified by the EAM). This effect is even more pronounced in a hydrophobic solvent, which mimics the less polar parts of a protein. This is in line with our bioinformatic results showing that the majority of pro-extended tripeptides are hydrophobic. The preference for a specific secondary structure by the studied tripeptides is thus governed by the plasticity to adopt to its environment. In addition, we show that most of the "naturally occurring" conformations of tripeptide sequences, i.e., those found in existing three-dimensional protein structures, are within ∼10 kcal·mol-1 from their global minima. In summary, our "ab initio" data suggest that complex protein structures may start to emerge already at the level of their small oligopeptidic units, which is in line with a hierarchical nature of protein folding.
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Affiliation(s)
- Martin Culka
- Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences , Flemingovo náměstí 2 , 166 10 , Praha 6 , Czech Republic
| | - Jakub Galgonek
- Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences , Flemingovo náměstí 2 , 166 10 , Praha 6 , Czech Republic
| | - Jiří Vymětal
- Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences , Flemingovo náměstí 2 , 166 10 , Praha 6 , Czech Republic
| | - Jiří Vondrášek
- Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences , Flemingovo náměstí 2 , 166 10 , Praha 6 , Czech Republic
| | - Lubomír Rulíšek
- Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences , Flemingovo náměstí 2 , 166 10 , Praha 6 , Czech Republic
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Lanza G, Chiacchio MA. Quantum Mechanics Study on Hydrophilic and Hydrophobic Interactions in the Trivaline-Water System. J Phys Chem B 2018; 122:4289-4298. [PMID: 29584432 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcb.8b00833] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/29/2022]
Abstract
With the aim to elucidate hydrophobic effects in the unfolded state of peptides, DFT-M062X computations on the Val3H+· nH2O ( n up to 22) clusters have been accomplished. As far as the main chain is concerned, four conformers with β-strand and/or polyproline type II conformations, PPII (indicated as β-β, β-PPII, PPII-β, and PPII-PPII), have been found by changing the ϕ and ψ angles. For bare peptide, the side chain (isopropyl) of each residue can independently take on three different orientations with negligible effects on energetics. The great isopropyl spatial separations in β-β and β-PPII conformers allow for the construction of synergic and extensive water-water and water-peptide H-bonding in the minimal hydration Val3H+·22H2O models without significant steric encumbrance. Conversely, due to the proximity of the isopropyl of the central residue with the other two, some restrictions in the water shell construction around the peptide become evident for the PPII-PPII conformer and the number of energetically accessible structures decreases. This is indicative of correlated motion involving isopropyls and backbone mediated by water molecules, the origin of the nearest neighbor effects. Comparing the thermodynamic data of Ala3H+·22H2O and Val3H+·22H2O, what emerges is that both hydration enthalpy and entropy drive the β-strand stability of the latter.
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Affiliation(s)
- Giuseppe Lanza
- Dipartimento di Scienze del Farmaco , Università di Catania , Viale A. Doria 6 , Catania 95125 , Italy
| | - Maria A Chiacchio
- Dipartimento di Scienze del Farmaco , Università di Catania , Viale A. Doria 6 , Catania 95125 , Italy
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Lanza G, Chiacchio MA. Quantum Mechanics Approach to Hydration Energies and Structures of Alanine and Dialanine. Chemphyschem 2017; 18:1586-1596. [PMID: 28371186 DOI: 10.1002/cphc.201700149] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/13/2017] [Indexed: 11/11/2022]
Abstract
A systematic approach to the phenomena related to hydration of biomolecules is reported at the state of the art of electronic-structure methods. Large-scale CCSD(T), MP4-SDQ, MP2, and DFT(M06-2X) calculations for some hydrated complexes of alanine and dialanine (Ala⋅13 H2 O, Ala2 H+ ⋅18 H2 O, and Ala2 ⋅18 H2 O) are compared with experimental data and other elaborate modeling to assess the reliability of a simple bottom-up approach. The inclusion of a minimal number of water molecules for microhydration of the polar groups together with the polarizable continuum model is sufficient to reproduce the relative bulk thermodynamic functions of the considered biomolecules. These quantities depend on the adopted electronic-structure method, which should be chosen with great care. Nevertheless, the computationally feasible MP2 and M06-2X functionals with the aug-cc-pVTZ basis set satisfactorily reproduce values derived by high-level CCSD(T) and MP4-SDQ methods, and thus they are suitable for future developments of more elaborate and hence more biochemically significant peptides.
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Affiliation(s)
- Giuseppe Lanza
- Dipartimento di Scienze del Farmaco, Università di Catania, Viale A. Doria 6, Catania, 95125, Italy
| | - Maria A Chiacchio
- Dipartimento di Scienze del Farmaco, Università di Catania, Viale A. Doria 6, Catania, 95125, Italy
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