1
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Manav N, Jit BP, Kataria B, Sharma A. Cellular and epigenetic perspective of protein stability and its implications in the biological system. Epigenomics 2024:1-22. [PMID: 38884355 DOI: 10.1080/17501911.2024.2351788] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/29/2023] [Accepted: 04/30/2024] [Indexed: 06/18/2024] Open
Abstract
Protein stability is a fundamental prerequisite in both experimental and therapeutic applications. Current advancements in high throughput experimental techniques and functional ontology approaches have elucidated that impairment in the structure and stability of proteins is intricately associated with the cause and cure of several diseases. Therefore, it is paramount to deeply understand the physical and molecular confounding factors governing the stability of proteins. In this review article, we comprehensively investigated the evolution of protein stability, examining its emergence over time, its relationship with organizational aspects and the experimental methods used to understand it. Furthermore, we have also emphasized the role of Epigenetics and its interplay with post-translational modifications (PTMs) in regulating the stability of proteins.
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Affiliation(s)
- Nisha Manav
- Department of Biochemistry, All India Institute of Medical Sciences New Delhi, Ansari Nagar, 110029, India
| | - Bimal Prasad Jit
- Department of Biochemistry, All India Institute of Medical Sciences New Delhi, Ansari Nagar, 110029, India
| | - Babita Kataria
- Department of Medical Oncology, National Cancer Institute, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Jhajjar, 124105, India
| | - Ashok Sharma
- Department of Biochemistry, All India Institute of Medical Sciences New Delhi, Ansari Nagar, 110029, India
- Department of Biochemistry, National Cancer Institute, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Jhajjar, 124105, India
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2
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Rollo C, Pancotti C, Birolo G, Rossi I, Sanavia T, Fariselli P. Influence of Model Structures on Predictors of Protein Stability Changes from Single-Point Mutations. Genes (Basel) 2023; 14:2228. [PMID: 38137050 PMCID: PMC10742815 DOI: 10.3390/genes14122228] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/25/2023] [Revised: 12/14/2023] [Accepted: 12/15/2023] [Indexed: 12/24/2023] Open
Abstract
Missense variation in genomes can affect protein structure stability and, in turn, the cell physiology behavior. Predicting the impact of those variations is relevant, and the best-performing computational tools exploit the protein structure information. However, most of the current protein sequence variants are unresolved, and comparative or ab initio tools can provide a structure. Here, we evaluate the impact of model structures, compared to experimental structures, on the predictors of protein stability changes upon single-point mutations, where no significant changes are expected between the original and the mutated structures. We show that there are substantial differences among the computational tools. Methods that rely on coarse-grained representation are less sensitive to the underlying protein structures. In contrast, tools that exploit more detailed molecular representations are sensible to structures generated from comparative modeling, even on single-residue substitutions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Cesare Rollo
- Department of Medical Sciences, University Torino, 10126 Torino, Italy (G.B.); (I.R.); (T.S.); (P.F.)
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3
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Binbay FA, Rathod DC, George AAP, Imhof D. Quality Assessment of Selected Protein Structures Derived from Homology Modeling and AlphaFold. Pharmaceuticals (Basel) 2023; 16:1662. [PMID: 38139789 PMCID: PMC10747200 DOI: 10.3390/ph16121662] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/07/2023] [Revised: 11/21/2023] [Accepted: 11/24/2023] [Indexed: 12/24/2023] Open
Abstract
With technology advancing, many prediction algorithms have been developed to facilitate the modeling of inherently dynamic and flexible macromolecules such as proteins. Improvements in the prediction of protein structures have attracted a great deal of attention due to the advantages they offer, e.g., in drug design. While trusted experimental methods, such as X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy, and electron microscopy, are preferred structure analysis techniques, in silico approaches are also being widely used. Two computational methods, which are on opposite ends of the spectrum with respect to their modus operandi, i.e., homology modeling and AlphaFold, have been established to provide high-quality structures. Here, a comparative study of the quality of structures either predicted by homology modeling or by AlphaFold is presented based on the characteristics determined by experimental studies using structure validation servers to fulfill the purpose. Although AlphaFold is able to predict high-quality structures, high-confidence parts are sometimes observed to be in disagreement with experimental data. On the other hand, while the structures obtained from homology modeling are successful in incorporating all aspects of the experimental structure used as a template, this method may struggle to accurately model a structure in the absence of a suitable template. In general, although both methods produce high-quality models, the criteria by which they are superior to each other are different and thus discussed in detail.
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Affiliation(s)
- Furkan Ayberk Binbay
- Pharmaceutical Biochemistry and Bioanalytics, Pharmaceutical Institute, University of Bonn, An der Immenburg 4, 53121 Bonn, Germany
| | - Dhruv Chetanbhai Rathod
- Pharmaceutical Biochemistry and Bioanalytics, Pharmaceutical Institute, University of Bonn, An der Immenburg 4, 53121 Bonn, Germany
| | | | - Diana Imhof
- Pharmaceutical Biochemistry and Bioanalytics, Pharmaceutical Institute, University of Bonn, An der Immenburg 4, 53121 Bonn, Germany
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4
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Turina P, Fariselli P, Capriotti E. K-Pro: Kinetics Data on Proteins and Mutants. J Mol Biol 2023; 435:168245. [PMID: 37625584 DOI: 10.1016/j.jmb.2023.168245] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/14/2023] [Revised: 08/16/2023] [Accepted: 08/17/2023] [Indexed: 08/27/2023]
Abstract
The study of protein folding plays a crucial role in improving our understanding of protein function and of the relationship between genetics and phenotypes. In particular, understanding the thermodynamics and kinetics of the folding process is important for uncovering the mechanisms behind human disorders caused by protein misfolding. To address this issue, it is essential to collect and curate experimental kinetic and thermodynamic data on protein folding. K-Pro is a new database designed for collecting and storing experimental kinetic data on monomeric proteins, with a two-state folding mechanism. With 1,529 records from 62 proteins corresponding to 65 structures, K-Pro contains various kinetic parameters such as the logarithm of the folding and unfolding rates, Tanford's β and the ϕ values. When available, the database also includes thermodynamic parameters associated with the kinetic data. K-Pro features a user-friendly interface that allows browsing and downloading kinetic data of interest. The graphical interface provides a visual representation of the protein and mutants, and it is cross-linked to key databases such as PDB, UniProt, and PubMed. K-Pro is open and freely accessible through https://folding.biofold.org/k-pro and supports the latest versions of popular browsers.
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Affiliation(s)
- Paola Turina
- Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology (FaBiT), University of Bologna, Via F. Selmi 3, 40126 Bologna, Italy
| | - Piero Fariselli
- Department of Medical Sciences, University of Torino, Via Santena 19, 10126 Torino, Italy
| | - Emidio Capriotti
- Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology (FaBiT), University of Bologna, Via F. Selmi 3, 40126 Bologna, Italy.
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5
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Zaji HD, Seyedalipour B, Hanun HM, Baziyar P, Hosseinkhani S, Akhlaghi M. Computational insight into in silico analysis and molecular dynamics simulation of the dimer interface residues of ALS-linked hSOD1 forms in apo/holo states: a combined experimental and bioinformatic perspective. 3 Biotech 2023; 13:92. [PMID: 36845075 PMCID: PMC9944573 DOI: 10.1007/s13205-023-03514-1] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/30/2022] [Accepted: 02/03/2023] [Indexed: 02/23/2023] Open
Abstract
The aggregation of misfolded SOD1 proteins in neurodegenerative illnesses is a key pathological hallmark in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). SOD1 is stabilized and enzymatically activated after binding to Cu/Zn and forming intramolecular disulfide. SOD1 aggregation/oligomerization is triggered by the dissociation of Cu and/or Zn ions. Therefore, we compared the possible effects of ALS-associated point mutations of the holo/apo forms of WT/I149T/V148G SOD1 variants located at the dimer interface to determine structural characterization using spectroscopic methods, computational approaches as well as molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Predictive results of computational analysis of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) suggested that mutant SOD1 has a deleterious effect on activity and structure destabilization. MD data analysis indicated that changes in flexibility, stability, hydrophobicity of the protein as well as increased intramolecular interactions of apo-SOD1 were more than holo-SOD1. Furthermore, a decrease in enzymatic activity in apo-SOD1 was observed compared to holo-SOD1. Comparative intrinsic and ANS fluorescence results of holo/apo-WT-hSOD1 and mutants indicated structural alterations in the local environment of tryptophan residue and hydrophobic patches, respectively. Experimental and MD data supported that substitution effect and metal deficiency of mutants (apo forms) in the dimer interface may promote the tendency to protein mis-folding and aggregation, consequently disrupting the dimer-monomer equilibrium and increased propensity to dissociation dimer into SOD-monomer ultimately leading to loss of stability and function. Overall, data analysis of apo/holo SOD1 forms on protein structure and function using computational and experimental studies will contribute to a better understanding of ALS pathogenicity.
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Affiliation(s)
- Hamza Dakhil Zaji
- Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, Faculty of Basic Science, University of Mazandaran, Babolsar, Iran
| | - Bagher Seyedalipour
- Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, Faculty of Basic Science, University of Mazandaran, Babolsar, Iran
| | - Haider Munzer Hanun
- Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, Faculty of Basic Science, University of Mazandaran, Babolsar, Iran
| | - Payam Baziyar
- Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, Faculty of Basic Science, University of Mazandaran, Babolsar, Iran
| | - Saman Hosseinkhani
- Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Biological Sciences, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran
| | - Mona Akhlaghi
- Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, Faculty of Basic Science, University of Mazandaran, Babolsar, Iran
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6
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Khan A, Cowen-Rivers AI, Grosnit A, Deik DGX, Robert PA, Greiff V, Smorodina E, Rawat P, Akbar R, Dreczkowski K, Tutunov R, Bou-Ammar D, Wang J, Storkey A, Bou-Ammar H. Toward real-world automated antibody design with combinatorial Bayesian optimization. CELL REPORTS METHODS 2023; 3:100374. [PMID: 36814835 PMCID: PMC9939385 DOI: 10.1016/j.crmeth.2022.100374] [Citation(s) in RCA: 12] [Impact Index Per Article: 12.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/29/2022] [Revised: 10/08/2022] [Accepted: 12/07/2022] [Indexed: 06/14/2023]
Abstract
Antibodies are multimeric proteins capable of highly specific molecular recognition. The complementarity determining region 3 of the antibody variable heavy chain (CDRH3) often dominates antigen-binding specificity. Hence, it is a priority to design optimal antigen-specific CDRH3 to develop therapeutic antibodies. The combinatorial structure of CDRH3 sequences makes it impossible to query binding-affinity oracles exhaustively. Moreover, antibodies are expected to have high target specificity and developability. Here, we present AntBO, a combinatorial Bayesian optimization framework utilizing a CDRH3 trust region for an in silico design of antibodies with favorable developability scores. The in silico experiments on 159 antigens demonstrate that AntBO is a step toward practically viable in vitro antibody design. In under 200 calls to the oracle, AntBO suggests antibodies outperforming the best binding sequence from 6.9 million experimentally obtained CDRH3s. Additionally, AntBO finds very-high-affinity CDRH3 in only 38 protein designs while requiring no domain knowledge.
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Affiliation(s)
- Asif Khan
- School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9YL, UK
| | | | | | | | - Philippe A. Robert
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo 0315, Norway
| | - Victor Greiff
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo 0315, Norway
| | - Eva Smorodina
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo 0315, Norway
| | - Puneet Rawat
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo 0315, Norway
| | - Rahmad Akbar
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo 0315, Norway
| | | | | | - Dany Bou-Ammar
- American University of Beirut Medical Centre, Beirut 11-0236, Lebanon
| | - Jun Wang
- Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab, London N1C 4AG, UK
- University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK
| | - Amos Storkey
- School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9YL, UK
| | - Haitham Bou-Ammar
- Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab, London N1C 4AG, UK
- University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK
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7
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Timpmann K, Kangur L, Freiberg A. Hysteretic Pressure Dependence of Ca 2+ Binding in LH1 Bacterial Membrane Chromoproteins. J Phys Chem B 2023; 127:456-464. [PMID: 36608327 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcb.2c05938] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/07/2023]
Abstract
Much of the thermodynamic parameter values that support life are set by the properties of proteins. While the denaturing effects of pressure and temperature on proteins are well documented, their precise structural nature is rarely revealed. This work investigates the destabilization of multiple Ca2+ binding sites in the cyclic LH1 light-harvesting membrane chromoprotein complexes from two Ca-containing sulfur purple bacteria by hydrostatic high-pressure perturbation spectroscopy. The native (Ca-saturated) and denatured (Ca-depleted) phases of these complexes are well distinguishable by much-shifted bacteriochlorophyll a exciton absorption bands serving as innate optical probes in this study. The pressure-induced denaturation of the complexes related to the failure of the protein Ca-binding pockets and the concomitant breakage of hydrogen bonds between the pigment chromophores and protein environment were found cooperative, involving all or most of the Ca2+ binding sites, but irreversible. The strong hysteresis observed in the spectral and kinetic characteristics of phase transitions along the compression and decompression pathways implies asymmetry in the relevant free energy landscapes and activation free energy distributions. A phase transition pressure equal to about 1.9 kbar was evaluated for the complexes from Thiorhodovibrio strain 970 from the pressure dependence of biphasic kinetics observed in the minutes to 100 h time range.
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Affiliation(s)
- Kõu Timpmann
- Institute of Physics, University of Tartu, W. Ostwald Str. 1, 50411 Tartu, Estonia
| | - Liina Kangur
- Institute of Physics, University of Tartu, W. Ostwald Str. 1, 50411 Tartu, Estonia
| | - Arvi Freiberg
- Institute of Physics, University of Tartu, W. Ostwald Str. 1, 50411 Tartu, Estonia.,Estonian Academy of Sciences, Kohtu 6, 10130 Tallinn, Estonia
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8
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Benevenuta S, Birolo G, Sanavia T, Capriotti E, Fariselli P. Challenges in predicting stabilizing variations: An exploration. Front Mol Biosci 2023; 9:1075570. [PMID: 36685278 PMCID: PMC9849384 DOI: 10.3389/fmolb.2022.1075570] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/20/2022] [Accepted: 12/15/2022] [Indexed: 01/06/2023] Open
Abstract
An open challenge of computational and experimental biology is understanding the impact of non-synonymous DNA variations on protein function and, subsequently, human health. The effects of these variants on protein stability can be measured as the difference in the free energy of unfolding (ΔΔG) between the mutated structure of the protein and its wild-type form. Throughout the years, bioinformaticians have developed a wide variety of tools and approaches to predict the ΔΔG. Although the performance of these tools is highly variable, overall they are less accurate in predicting ΔΔG stabilizing variations rather than the destabilizing ones. Here, we analyze the possible reasons for this difference by focusing on the relationship between experimentally-measured ΔΔG and seven protein properties on three widely-used datasets (S2648, VariBench, Ssym) and a recently introduced one (S669). These properties include protein structural information, different physical properties and statistical potentials. We found that two highly used input features, i.e., hydrophobicity and the Blosum62 substitution matrix, show a performance close to random choice when trying to separate stabilizing variants from either neutral or destabilizing ones. We then speculate that, since destabilizing variations are the most abundant class in the available datasets, the overall performance of the methods is higher when including features that improve the prediction for the destabilizing variants at the expense of the stabilizing ones. These findings highlight the need of designing predictive methods able to exploit also input features highly correlated with the stabilizing variants. New tools should also be tested on a not-artificially balanced dataset, reporting the performance on all the three classes (i.e., stabilizing, neutral and destabilizing variants) and not only the overall results.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Giovanni Birolo
- Department of Medical Sciences, University of Torino, Torino, Italy
| | - Tiziana Sanavia
- Department of Medical Sciences, University of Torino, Torino, Italy
| | - Emidio Capriotti
- Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology (FaBiT), University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
| | - Piero Fariselli
- Department of Medical Sciences, University of Torino, Torino, Italy,*Correspondence: Piero Fariselli,
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9
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Sonar K, Mancera RL. Characterization of the Conformations of Amyloid Beta 42 in Solution That May Mediate Its Initial Hydrophobic Aggregation. J Phys Chem B 2022; 126:7916-7933. [PMID: 36179370 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcb.2c04743] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/28/2022]
Abstract
Intrinsically disordered peptides, such as amyloid β42 (Aβ42), lack a well-defined structure in solution. Aβ42 can undergo abnormal aggregation and amyloidogenesis in the brain, forming fibrillar plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. The insoluble fibrillar forms of Aβ42 exhibit well-defined, cross β-sheet structures at the molecular level and are less toxic than the soluble, intermediate disordered oligomeric forms. However, the mechanism of initial interaction of monomers and subsequent oligomerization is not well understood. The structural disorder of Aβ42 adds to the challenges of determining the structural properties of its monomers, making it difficult to understand the underlying molecular mechanism of pathogenic aggregation. Certain regions of Aβ42 are known to exhibit helical propensity in different physiological conditions. NMR spectroscopy has shown that the Aβ42 monomer at lower pH can adopt an α-helical conformation and as the pH is increased, the peptide switches to β-sheet conformation and aggregation occurs. CD spectroscopy studies of aggregation have shown the presence of an initial spike in the amount of α-helical content at the start of aggregation. Such an increase in α-helical content suggests a mechanism wherein the peptide can expose critical non-polar residues for interaction, leading to hydrophobic aggregation with other interacting peptides. We have used molecular dynamics simulations to characterize in detail the conformational landscape of monomeric Aβ42 in solution to identify molecular properties that may mediate the early stages of oligomerization. We hypothesized that conformations with α-helical structure have a higher probability of initiating aggregation because they increase the hydrophobicity of the peptide. Although random coil conformations were found to be the most dominant, as expected, α-helical conformations are thermodynamically accessible, more so than β-sheet conformations. Importantly, for the first time α-helical conformations are observed to increase the exposure of aromatic and hydrophobic residues to the aqueous solvent, favoring their hydrophobically driven interaction with other monomers to initiate aggregation. These findings constitute a first step toward characterizing the mechanism of formation of disordered, low-order oligomers of Aβ42.
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Affiliation(s)
- Krushna Sonar
- Curtin Medical School, Curtin Health Innovation Research Institute, Curtin Institute for Computation, Curtin University, P. O. Box U1987, Perth, Western Australia6845, Australia
| | - Ricardo L Mancera
- Curtin Medical School, Curtin Health Innovation Research Institute, Curtin Institute for Computation, Curtin University, P. O. Box U1987, Perth, Western Australia6845, Australia
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10
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Gonzalez‐Olvera MA, Olivares‐Quiroz L. Conformational Effects of Mutations and Spherical Confinement in Small Peptides through Hybrid Multi‐Population Genetic Algorithms. MACROMOL THEOR SIMUL 2022. [DOI: 10.1002/mats.202200035] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/12/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Marcos A Gonzalez‐Olvera
- Colegio de Ciencia y Tecnología Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de Mexico (UACM) Mexico City CP 09760 Mexico
| | - Luis Olivares‐Quiroz
- Colegio de Ciencia y Tecnología Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de Mexico (UACM) Mexico City CP 09760 Mexico
- Centro de Ciencias de la Complejidad C3 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico Mexico City CP 04510 Mexico
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11
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Yang J, Cheng WX, Zhao XF, Wu G, Sheng ST, Hu Q, Ge H, Qin Q, Jin X, Zhang L, Zhang P. Comprehensive folding variations for protein folding. Proteins 2022; 90:1851-1872. [DOI: 10.1002/prot.26381] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/15/2022] [Revised: 04/12/2022] [Accepted: 04/22/2022] [Indexed: 11/12/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Jiaan Yang
- Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences Shenzhen Guangdong China
- Micro Biotech, Ltd. Shanghai China
| | - Wen Xiang Cheng
- Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences Shenzhen Guangdong China
| | | | - Gang Wu
- School of Basic Medicine, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology Wuhan China
| | - Shi Tong Sheng
- Shenzhen Hua Ying Kang Gene Technology Co., Ltd Shenzhen Guangdong China
| | - Qiyue Hu
- Shanghai Hengrui Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. Shanghai China
| | - Hu Ge
- Shanghai Hengrui Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. Shanghai China
| | - Qianshan Qin
- Shanghai Hengrui Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. Shanghai China
| | - Xinshen Jin
- Shanghai Hengrui Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. Shanghai China
| | | | - Peng Zhang
- Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences Shenzhen Guangdong China
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12
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Joy A, Biswas R. Molecular Insight into the High Thermal Stability of Metalloprotein Azurin. J Phys Chem B 2022; 126:2496-2506. [PMID: 35324174 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcb.2c00622] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/29/2022]
Abstract
We investigate the events characterizing the steps of the unfolding pathway of blue copper metalloprotein azurin using replica exchange molecular dynamics (REMD). Our studies show that the unfolding of azurin begins with the melting of α-helix and β-sheets II and V. This is followed by the melting of other β-sheets and the exposure of hydrophobic protein core to the solvent, resulting in disruptions of its tertiary structure. Free energy surfaces constructed at different temperatures portray different basins that signify the stability of different melted structures in the unfolding process. The contact maps at different temperatures reveal that the strong hydrophobic interaction within the core of the protein is the vital force that renders high stability to this protein. Analysis of the individual β-sheets by looking into their amino acid sequence shows that β-sheets with charged side chains on the surface melt fast compared to others. The β-barrel of azurin is able to dynamically rearrange, and it helps the protein to preserve its hydrophobic core, holding back the native topology from melting fast. B-factor analysis shows that residues of β-sheets III, IV, and VII deviate less from their initial structure at the transition temperature.
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Affiliation(s)
- Albin Joy
- Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati, Yerpedu 517619, Andhra Pradesh, India
| | - Rajib Biswas
- Department of Chemistry and Center for Atomic, Molecular and Optical Sciences & Technologies, Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati, Yerpedu 517619, Andhra Pradesh, India
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13
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Abstract
Proteins have dynamic structures that undergo chain motions on time scales spanning from picoseconds to seconds. Resolving the resultant conformational heterogeneity is essential for gaining accurate insight into fundamental mechanistic aspects of the protein folding reaction. The use of high-resolution structural probes, sensitive to population distributions, has begun to enable the resolution of site-specific conformational heterogeneity at different stages of the folding reaction. Different states populated during protein folding, including the unfolded state, collapsed intermediate states, and even the native state, are found to possess significant conformational heterogeneity. Heterogeneity in protein folding and unfolding reactions originates from the reduced cooperativity of various kinds of physicochemical interactions between various structural elements of a protein, and between a protein and solvent. Heterogeneity may arise because of functional or evolutionary constraints. Conformational substates within the unfolded state and the collapsed intermediates that exchange at rates slower than the subsequent folding steps give rise to heterogeneity on the protein folding pathways. Multiple folding pathways are likely to represent distinct sequences of structure formation. Insight into the nature of the energy barriers separating different conformational states populated during (un)folding can also be obtained by resolving heterogeneity.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sandhya Bhatia
- National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bengaluru 560065, India.,Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune 411008, India
| | - Jayant B Udgaonkar
- National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bengaluru 560065, India.,Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune 411008, India
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14
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Mathew B, Oh JM, Abdelgawad MA, Khames A, Ghoneim MM, Kumar S, Nath LR, Sudevan ST, Parambi DGT, Agoni C, Soliman MES, Kim H. Conjugated Dienones from Differently Substituted Cinnamaldehyde as Highly Potent Monoamine Oxidase-B Inhibitors: Synthesis, Biochemistry, and Computational Chemistry. ACS OMEGA 2022; 7:8184-8197. [PMID: 35284720 PMCID: PMC8908507 DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.2c00397] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/19/2022] [Accepted: 02/11/2022] [Indexed: 02/08/2023]
Abstract
Fifteen multiconjugated dienones (MK1-MK15) were synthesized and evaluated to determine their inhibitory activities against monoamine oxidases (MAOs) A and B. All derivatives were found to be potent and highly selective MAO-B inhibitors. Compound MK6, with an IC50 value of 2.82 nM, most effectively inhibited MAO-B, like MK12 (IC50 = 3.22 nM), followed by MK5, MK13, and MK14 (IC50 = 4.02, 4.24, and 4.89 nM, respectively). The selectivity index values of MK6 and MK12 for MAO-B over MAO-A were 7361.5 and 1780.5, respectively. Compounds MK6 and MK12 were competitive reversible inhibitors of MAO-B, with K i values of 1.10 ± 0.20 and 3.0 ± 0.27 nM, respectively. Cytotoxic studies showed that MK5, MK6, MK12, and MK14 exhibited low toxicities on Vero cells, with IC50 values of 218.4, 149.1, 99.96, and 162.3 μg/mL, respectively, which were much higher than those for their effective nanomolar-level concentrations. Also, MK5, MK6, MK12, and MK14 decreased cell damage in H2O2-induced cells via a significant scavenging effect of reactive oxygen species. Molecular modeling was performed to rationalize the potential inhibitory activities of MK5, MK6, MK12, and MK14 toward MAO-B and their possible binding mechanisms, showing high-affinity binding pocket interactions and conformation perturbations of the compounds with MAO-B, which were interpreted as the conformational dynamics of MAO-B. This study concluded that all the compounds tested were more potent MAO-B inhibitors than the reference drugs, and leading compounds could be further explored for their effectiveness in various kinds of neurodegenerative disorders.
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Affiliation(s)
- Bijo Mathew
- Department
of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Amrita School of Pharmacy, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, AIMS Health Sciences Campus, Kochi 682041, India
- ,
| | - Jong Min Oh
- Department
of Pharmacy, and Research Institute of Life Pharmaceutical Sciences, Sunchon National University, Suncheon 57922, Republic of Korea
| | - Mohamed A. Abdelgawad
- Department
of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, College of Pharmacy, Jouf University, Sakaka, Al Jouf 72341, Saudi Arabia
| | - Ahmed Khames
- Department
of Pharmaceutics and Industrial Pharmacy, College of Pharmacy, Taif University, P.O. Box 11099, Taif 21944, Saudi Arabia
| | - Mohammed M. Ghoneim
- Department
of Pharmacy Practice, Faculty of Pharmacy, AlMaarefa University, Ad Diriyah 13713, Saudi Arabia
| | - Sunil Kumar
- Department
of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Amrita School of Pharmacy, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, AIMS Health Sciences Campus, Kochi 682041, India
| | - Lekshmi R. Nath
- Department
of Pharmacognosy, Amrita School of Pharmacy, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, AIMS Health Sciences Campus, Kochi 682041, India
| | - Sachithra Thazhathuveedu Sudevan
- Department
of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Amrita School of Pharmacy, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, AIMS Health Sciences Campus, Kochi 682041, India
| | - Della Grace Thomas Parambi
- Department
of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, College of Pharmacy, Jouf University, Sakaka, Al Jouf 72341, Saudi Arabia
| | - Clement Agoni
- Molecular
Bio-Computation and Drug Design Laboratory, School of Health Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville Campus, Durban 4001, South
Africa
| | - Mahmoud E. S. Soliman
- Molecular
Bio-Computation and Drug Design Laboratory, School of Health Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville Campus, Durban 4001, South
Africa
| | - Hoon Kim
- Department
of Pharmacy, and Research Institute of Life Pharmaceutical Sciences, Sunchon National University, Suncheon 57922, Republic of Korea
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15
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Pancotti C, Benevenuta S, Birolo G, Alberini V, Repetto V, Sanavia T, Capriotti E, Fariselli P. Predicting protein stability changes upon single-point mutation: a thorough comparison of the available tools on a new dataset. Brief Bioinform 2022; 23:6502552. [PMID: 35021190 PMCID: PMC8921618 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbab555] [Citation(s) in RCA: 38] [Impact Index Per Article: 19.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/28/2021] [Revised: 11/29/2021] [Accepted: 12/05/2021] [Indexed: 12/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Predicting the difference in thermodynamic stability between protein variants is crucial for protein design and understanding the genotype-phenotype relationships. So far, several computational tools have been created to address this task. Nevertheless, most of them have been trained or optimized on the same and ‘all’ available data, making a fair comparison unfeasible. Here, we introduce a novel dataset, collected and manually cleaned from the latest version of the ThermoMutDB database, consisting of 669 variants not included in the most widely used training datasets. The prediction performance and the ability to satisfy the antisymmetry property by considering both direct and reverse variants were evaluated across 21 different tools. The Pearson correlations of the tested tools were in the ranges of 0.21–0.5 and 0–0.45 for the direct and reverse variants, respectively. When both direct and reverse variants are considered, the antisymmetric methods perform better achieving a Pearson correlation in the range of 0.51–0.62. The tested methods seem relatively insensitive to the physiological conditions, performing well also on the variants measured with more extreme pH and temperature values. A common issue with all the tested methods is the compression of the \documentclass[12pt]{minimal}
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}{}$\Delta \Delta G$\end{document} predictions toward zero. Furthermore, the thermodynamic stability of the most significantly stabilizing variants was found to be more challenging to predict. This study is the most extensive comparisons of prediction methods using an entirely novel set of variants never tested before.
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Affiliation(s)
- Corrado Pancotti
- Department of Medical Sciences, University of Torino, Via Santena 19, 10126 Torino, Italy
| | - Silvia Benevenuta
- Department of Medical Sciences, University of Torino, Via Santena 19, 10126 Torino, Italy
| | - Giovanni Birolo
- Department of Medical Sciences, University of Torino, Via Santena 19, 10126 Torino, Italy
| | - Virginia Alberini
- Department of Medical Sciences, University of Torino, Via Santena 19, 10126 Torino, Italy
| | - Valeria Repetto
- Department of Medical Sciences, University of Torino, Via Santena 19, 10126 Torino, Italy
| | - Tiziana Sanavia
- Department of Medical Sciences, University of Torino, Via Santena 19, 10126 Torino, Italy
| | - Emidio Capriotti
- Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology (FaBiT), University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
| | - Piero Fariselli
- Department of Medical Sciences, University of Torino, Via Santena 19, 10126 Torino, Italy
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16
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Signorini LF, Perego C, Potestio R. Protein self-entanglement modulates successful folding to the native state: A multi-scale modeling study. J Chem Phys 2021; 155:115101. [PMID: 34551527 DOI: 10.1063/5.0063254] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/31/2022] Open
Abstract
The computer-aided investigation of protein folding has greatly benefited from coarse-grained models, that is, simplified representations at a resolution level lower than atomistic, providing access to qualitative and quantitative details of the folding process that would be hardly attainable, via all-atom descriptions, for medium to long molecules. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of low-resolution models is itself hampered by the presence, in a small but significant number of proteins, of nontrivial topological self-entanglements. Features such as native state knots or slipknots introduce conformational bottlenecks, affecting the probability to fold into the correct conformation; this limitation is particularly severe in the context of coarse-grained models. In this work, we tackle the relationship between folding probability, protein folding pathway, and protein topology in a set of proteins with a nontrivial degree of topological complexity. To avoid or mitigate the risk of incurring in kinetic traps, we make use of the elastic folder model, a coarse-grained model based on angular potentials optimized toward successful folding via a genetic procedure. This light-weight representation allows us to estimate in silico folding probabilities, which we find to anti-correlate with a measure of topological complexity as well as to correlate remarkably well with experimental measurements of the folding rate. These results strengthen the hypothesis that the topological complexity of the native state decreases the folding probability and that the force-field optimization mimics the evolutionary process these proteins have undergone to avoid kinetic traps.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lorenzo Federico Signorini
- The George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel and Department of Physics, University of Trento, Trento, Italy
| | - Claudio Perego
- Department of Innovative Technologies, University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland, Manno, Switzerland and Polymer Theory Department, Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Mainz, Germany
| | - Raffaello Potestio
- Department of Physics, University of Trento, Trento, Italy and INFN-TIFPA, Trento Institute for Fundamental Physics and Applications, Trento, Italy
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17
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Vu QV, Jiang Y, Li MS, O'Brien EP. The driving force for co-translational protein folding is weaker in the ribosome vestibule due to greater water ordering. Chem Sci 2021; 12:11851-11857. [PMID: 34659725 PMCID: PMC8442680 DOI: 10.1039/d1sc01008e] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/19/2021] [Accepted: 08/02/2021] [Indexed: 01/12/2023] Open
Abstract
Interactions between the ribosome and nascent chain can destabilize folded domains in the ribosome exit tunnel's vestibule, the last 3 nm of the exit tunnel where tertiary folding can occur. Here, we test if a contribution to this destabilization is a weakening of hydrophobic association, the driving force for protein folding. Using all-atom molecular dynamics simulations, we calculate the potential-of-mean force between two methane molecules along the center line of the ribosome exit tunnel and in bulk solution. Associated methanes, we find, are half as stable in the ribosome's vestibule as compared to bulk solution, demonstrating that the hydrophobic effect is weakened by the presence of the ribosome. This decreased stability arises from a decrease in the amount of water entropy gained upon the association of the methanes. And this decreased entropy gain originates from water molecules being more ordered in the vestibule as compared to bulk solution. Therefore, the hydrophobic effect is weaker in the vestibule because waters released from the first solvation shell of methanes upon association do not gain as much entropy in the vestibule as they do upon release in bulk solution. These findings mean that nascent proteins pass through a ribosome vestibule environment that can destabilize folded structures, which has the potential to influence co-translational protein folding pathways, energetics, and kinetics.
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Affiliation(s)
- Quyen V. Vu
- Institute of Physics, Polish Academy of SciencesAl. Lotnikow 32/4602-668 WarsawPoland
| | - Yang Jiang
- Department of Chemistry, Penn State UniversityUniversity ParkPennsylvaniaUSA
| | - Mai Suan Li
- Institute of Physics, Polish Academy of SciencesAl. Lotnikow 32/4602-668 WarsawPoland,Institute for Computational Sciences and TechnologyQuang Trung Software City, Tan Chanh Hiep Ward, District 12Ho Chi Minh CityVietnam
| | - Edward P. O'Brien
- Department of Chemistry, Penn State UniversityUniversity ParkPennsylvaniaUSA,Bioinformatics and Genomics Graduate Program, The Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, Penn State UniversityUniversity ParkPennsylvaniaUSA,Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, Penn State UniversityUniversity ParkPennsylvaniaUSA
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18
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Shukla V, Runthala A, Rajput VS, Chandrasai PD, Tripathi A, Phulara SC. Computational and synthetic biology approaches for the biosynthesis of antiviral and anticancer terpenoids from Bacillus subtilis. Med Chem 2021; 18:307-322. [PMID: 34254925 DOI: 10.2174/1573406417666210712211557] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/09/2020] [Revised: 04/18/2021] [Accepted: 04/25/2021] [Indexed: 11/22/2022]
Abstract
Recent advancements in medicinal research have identified several antiviral and anticancer terpenoids that are usually deployed as a source of flavor, fragrances and pharmaceuticals. Under the current COVID-19 pandemic conditions, natural therapeutics with least side effects are the need of the hour to save the patients, especially, which are pre-affected with other medical complications. Although, plants are the major sources of terpenoids; however, for the environmental concerns, the global interest has shifted to the biocatalytic production of molecules from microbial sources. The gram-positive bacterium Bacillus subtilis is a suitable host in this regard due to its GRAS (generally regarded as safe) status, ease in genetic manipulations and wide industrial acceptability. The B. subtilis synthesizes its terpenoid molecules from 1-deoxy-d-xylulose-5-phosphate (DXP) pathway, a common route in almost all microbial strains. Here, we summarize the computational and synthetic biology approaches to improve the production of terpenoid-based therapeutics from B. subtilis by utilizing DXP pathway. We focus on the in-silico approaches for screening the functionally improved enzyme-variants of the two crucial enzymes namely, the DXP synthase (DXS) and farnesyl pyrophosphate synthase (FPPS). The approaches for engineering the active sites are subsequently explained. It will be helpful to construct the functionally improved enzymes for the high-yield production of terpenoid-based anticancer and antiviral metabolites, which would help to reduce the cost and improve the availability of such therapeutics for the humankind.
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Affiliation(s)
- Vibha Shukla
- Food, Drug and Chemical Toxicology Group, CSIR-Indian Institute of Toxicology Research, Vishvigyan Bhawan, 31 Mahatma Gandhi Marg, Lucknow-226001, India
| | - Ashish Runthala
- Department of Biotechnology, Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation, Vaddeswaram, Guntur-522502, Andhra Pradesh, India
| | | | - Potla Durthi Chandrasai
- Department of Biotechnology, National Institute of Technology Warangal, Warangal-506004, Telangana, India
| | - Anurag Tripathi
- Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR), Ghaziabad- 201002, India
| | - Suresh Chandra Phulara
- Department of Biotechnology, Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation, Vaddeswaram, Guntur-522502, Andhra Pradesh, India
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19
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Merlotti A, Menichetti G, Fariselli P, Capriotti E, Remondini D. Network-based strategies for protein characterization. ADVANCES IN PROTEIN CHEMISTRY AND STRUCTURAL BIOLOGY 2021; 127:217-248. [PMID: 34340768 DOI: 10.1016/bs.apcsb.2021.05.001] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/20/2022]
Abstract
Protein structure characterization is fundamental to understand protein properties, such as folding process and protein resistance to thermal stress, up to unveiling organism pathologies (e.g., prion disease). In this chapter, we provide an overview on how the spectral properties of the networks reconstructed from the Protein Contact Map (PCM) can be used to generate informative observables. As a specific case study, we apply two different network approaches to an example protein dataset, for the aim of discriminating protein folding state, and for the reconstruction of protein 3D structure.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Giulia Menichetti
- Center for Complex Network Research, Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, United States; Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States
| | - Piero Fariselli
- Department of Medical Sciences, University of Torino, Turin, Italy
| | - Emidio Capriotti
- Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
| | - Daniel Remondini
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy.
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20
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A Deep-Learning Sequence-Based Method to Predict Protein Stability Changes Upon Genetic Variations. Genes (Basel) 2021; 12:genes12060911. [PMID: 34204764 PMCID: PMC8231498 DOI: 10.3390/genes12060911] [Citation(s) in RCA: 18] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/14/2021] [Revised: 06/08/2021] [Accepted: 06/09/2021] [Indexed: 01/17/2023] Open
Abstract
Several studies have linked disruptions of protein stability and its normal functions to disease. Therefore, during the last few decades, many tools have been developed to predict the free energy changes upon protein residue variations. Most of these methods require both sequence and structure information to obtain reliable predictions. However, the lower number of protein structures available with respect to their sequences, due to experimental issues, drastically limits the application of these tools. In addition, current methodologies ignore the antisymmetric property characterizing the thermodynamics of the protein stability: a variation from wild-type to a mutated form of the protein structure (XW→XM) and its reverse process (XM→XW) must have opposite values of the free energy difference (ΔΔGWM=−ΔΔGMW). Here we propose ACDC-NN-Seq, a deep neural network system that exploits the sequence information and is able to incorporate into its architecture the antisymmetry property. To our knowledge, this is the first convolutional neural network to predict protein stability changes relying solely on the protein sequence. We show that ACDC-NN-Seq compares favorably with the existing sequence-based methods.
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21
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Mahmud S, Islam MJ, Parves MR, Khan MA, Tabussum L, Ahmed S, Ali MA, Fakayode SO, Halim MA. Designing potent inhibitors against the multidrug resistance P-glycoprotein. J Biomol Struct Dyn 2021; 40:9403-9415. [PMID: 34060432 DOI: 10.1080/07391102.2021.1930159] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/14/2022]
Abstract
The multidrug transporter P-glycoprotein is an ATP binding cassette (ABC) exporter responsible for resistance to tumor cells during chemotherapy. This study was designed with computational approaches aimed at identifying the best potent inhibitors of P-glycoprotein. Although many compounds have been suggested to inhibit P-glycoprotein, however, their information on bioavailability, selectivity, ADMET properties, and molecular interactions has not been revealed. Molecular docking, ADMET analysis, molecular dynamics, Principal component analysis (PCA), and binding free energy calculations were performed. Two compounds D1 and D2 showed the best docking score against P-glycoprotein and both compounds have 4-thiazolidinone derivatives containing indolin-3 one moiety are novel anti-tumor compounds. ADMET calculation analysis predicted D1 and D2 to have acceptable pharmacokinetic properties. The MD simulation discloses that D1-P-glycoprotein and D2-P-glycoprotein complexes are in stable conformation as apo-form. Hydrophobic amino acid such as phenylalanine plays significant on the interactions of inhibitors. Principal component analysis shows that both complexes are relatively similar variables as apo-form except planarity and Columbo energy profile. In addition, Quantitative Structural Activity Relationship (QSAR) of the ligand candidates were subjected to the principal component analysis (PCA) for pattern recognition. Partial-least-square (PLS) regression analysis was further utilized to model drug candidates' QSAR for subsequent prediction of the binding energy of validated drug candidates. PCA revealed groupings of the drug candidates based on the similarity or differences in drug candidates QSAR. Moreover, the developed PLS regression accurately predicted the values of the binding energy of drug candidates, with low residual error of prediction.Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma.
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Affiliation(s)
- Shafi Mahmud
- Division of Computer Aided Drug-Design, The Red-Green Research Center, BICCB, Tejgaon, Dhaka, Bangladesh.,Department of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Rajshahi, Rajshahi, Bangladesh
| | - Md Jahirul Islam
- Division of Computer Aided Drug-Design, The Red-Green Research Center, BICCB, Tejgaon, Dhaka, Bangladesh
| | - Md Rimon Parves
- Division of Computer Aided Drug-Design, The Red-Green Research Center, BICCB, Tejgaon, Dhaka, Bangladesh.,Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology, University of Science and Technology Chittagong (USTC), Chittagong, Bangladesh
| | - Md Arif Khan
- Division of Computer Aided Drug-Design, The Red-Green Research Center, BICCB, Tejgaon, Dhaka, Bangladesh.,Department of Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering, University of Development Alternative (UODA), Dhaka, Bangladesh
| | - Lamiya Tabussum
- Division of Computer Aided Drug-Design, The Red-Green Research Center, BICCB, Tejgaon, Dhaka, Bangladesh.,Department of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Rajshahi, Rajshahi, Bangladesh
| | - Sinthyia Ahmed
- Division of Computer Aided Drug-Design, The Red-Green Research Center, BICCB, Tejgaon, Dhaka, Bangladesh
| | - Md Ackas Ali
- Division of Computer Aided Drug-Design, The Red-Green Research Center, BICCB, Tejgaon, Dhaka, Bangladesh
| | - Sayo O Fakayode
- Department of Physical Sciences, University of Arkansas-Fort Smith, Fort Smith, Arkansas, USA
| | - Mohammad A Halim
- Department of Physical Sciences, University of Arkansas-Fort Smith, Fort Smith, Arkansas, USA
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22
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Petrosino M, Novak L, Pasquo A, Chiaraluce R, Turina P, Capriotti E, Consalvi V. Analysis and Interpretation of the Impact of Missense Variants in Cancer. Int J Mol Sci 2021; 22:ijms22115416. [PMID: 34063805 PMCID: PMC8196604 DOI: 10.3390/ijms22115416] [Citation(s) in RCA: 25] [Impact Index Per Article: 8.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/30/2021] [Revised: 05/03/2021] [Accepted: 05/17/2021] [Indexed: 01/10/2023] Open
Abstract
Large scale genome sequencing allowed the identification of a massive number of genetic variations, whose impact on human health is still unknown. In this review we analyze, by an in silico-based strategy, the impact of missense variants on cancer-related genes, whose effect on protein stability and function was experimentally determined. We collected a set of 164 variants from 11 proteins to analyze the impact of missense mutations at structural and functional levels, and to assess the performance of state-of-the-art methods (FoldX and Meta-SNP) for predicting protein stability change and pathogenicity. The result of our analysis shows that a combination of experimental data on protein stability and in silico pathogenicity predictions allowed the identification of a subset of variants with a high probability of having a deleterious phenotypic effect, as confirmed by the significant enrichment of the subset in variants annotated in the COSMIC database as putative cancer-driving variants. Our analysis suggests that the integration of experimental and computational approaches may contribute to evaluate the risk for complex disorders and develop more effective treatment strategies.
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Affiliation(s)
- Maria Petrosino
- Dipartimento Scienze Biochimiche “A. Rossi Fanelli”, Sapienza University of Rome, 00185 Roma, Italy; (M.P.); (L.N.); (R.C.)
| | - Leonore Novak
- Dipartimento Scienze Biochimiche “A. Rossi Fanelli”, Sapienza University of Rome, 00185 Roma, Italy; (M.P.); (L.N.); (R.C.)
| | - Alessandra Pasquo
- ENEA CR Frascati, Diagnostics and Metrology Laboratory FSN-TECFIS-DIM, 00044 Frascati, Italy;
| | - Roberta Chiaraluce
- Dipartimento Scienze Biochimiche “A. Rossi Fanelli”, Sapienza University of Rome, 00185 Roma, Italy; (M.P.); (L.N.); (R.C.)
| | - Paola Turina
- Dipartimento di Farmacia e Biotecnologie (FaBiT), University of Bologna, 40126 Bologna, Italy;
| | - Emidio Capriotti
- Dipartimento di Farmacia e Biotecnologie (FaBiT), University of Bologna, 40126 Bologna, Italy;
- Correspondence: (E.C.); (V.C.)
| | - Valerio Consalvi
- Dipartimento Scienze Biochimiche “A. Rossi Fanelli”, Sapienza University of Rome, 00185 Roma, Italy; (M.P.); (L.N.); (R.C.)
- Correspondence: (E.C.); (V.C.)
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23
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Turina P, Fariselli P, Capriotti E. ThermoScan: Semi-automatic Identification of Protein Stability Data From PubMed. Front Mol Biosci 2021; 8:620475. [PMID: 33842537 PMCID: PMC8027235 DOI: 10.3389/fmolb.2021.620475] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/23/2020] [Accepted: 02/18/2021] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
During the last years, the increasing number of DNA sequencing and protein mutagenesis studies has generated a large amount of variation data published in the biomedical literature. The collection of such data has been essential for the development and assessment of tools predicting the impact of protein variants at functional and structural levels. Nevertheless, the collection of manually curated data from literature is a highly time consuming and costly process that requires domain experts. In particular, the development of methods for predicting the effect of amino acid variants on protein stability relies on the thermodynamic data extracted from literature. In the past, such data were deposited in the ProTherm database, which however is no longer maintained since 2013. For facilitating the collection of protein thermodynamic data from literature, we developed the semi-automatic tool ThermoScan. ThermoScan is a text mining approach for the identification of relevant thermodynamic data on protein stability from full-text articles. The method relies on a regular expression searching for groups of words, including the most common conceptual words appearing in experimental studies on protein stability, several thermodynamic variables, and their units of measure. ThermoScan analyzes full-text articles from the PubMed Central Open Access subset and calculates an empiric score that allows the identification of manuscripts reporting thermodynamic data on protein stability. The method was optimized on a set of publications included in the ProTherm database, and tested on a new curated set of articles, manually selected for presence of thermodynamic data. The results show that ThermoScan returns accurate predictions and outperforms recently developed text-mining algorithms based on the analysis of publication abstracts. Availability: The ThermoScan server is freely accessible online at https://folding.biofold.org/thermoscan. The ThermoScan python code and the Google Chrome extension for submitting visualized PMC web pages to the ThermoScan server are available at https://github.com/biofold/ThermoScan.
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Affiliation(s)
- Paola Turina
- Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology (FaBiT), University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
| | - Piero Fariselli
- Department of Medical Sciences, University of Torino, Torino, Italy
| | - Emidio Capriotti
- Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology (FaBiT), University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
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24
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Alas-Guardado SJ, González-Pérez PP, Beltrán HI. Contributions of topological polar-polar contacts to achieve better folding stability of 2D/3D HP lattice proteins: An in silico approach. AIMS BIOPHYSICS 2021. [DOI: 10.3934/biophy.2021023] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/14/2022] Open
Abstract
<abstract>
<p>Many of the simplistic hydrophobic-polar lattice models, such as Dill's model (called <bold>Model 1</bold> herein), are aimed to fold structures through hydrophobic-hydrophobic interactions mimicking the well-known hydrophobic collapse present in protein structures. In this work, we studied 11 designed hydrophobic-polar sequences, S<sub>1</sub>-S<sub>8</sub> folded in 2D-square lattice, and S<sub>9</sub>-S<sub>11</sub> folded in 3D-cubic lattice. And to better fold these structures we have developed <bold>Model 2</bold> as an approximation to convex function aimed to weight hydrophobic-hydrophobic but also polar-polar contacts as an augmented version of <bold>Model 1</bold>. In this partitioned approach hydrophobic-hydrophobic ponderation was tuned as <italic>α</italic>-1 and polar-polar ponderation as <italic>α</italic>. This model is centered in preserving required hydrophobic substructure, and at the same time including polar-polar interactions, otherwise absent, to reach a better folding score now also acquiring the polar-polar substructure. In all tested cases the folding trials were better achieved with <bold>Model 2</bold>, using <italic>α</italic> values of 0.05, 0.1, 0.2 and 0.3 depending of sequence size, even finding optimal scores not reached with <bold>Model 1</bold>. An important result is that the better folding score, required the lower <italic>α</italic> weighting. And when <italic>α</italic> values above 0.3 are employed, no matter the nature of the hydrophobic-polar sequence, banning of hydrophobic-hydrophobic contacts started, thus yielding misfolding of sequences. Therefore, the value of <italic>α</italic> to correctly fold structures is the result of a careful weighting among hydrophobic-hydrophobic and polar-polar contacts.</p>
</abstract>
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25
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Han Z, Lian C, Ma Y, Zhang C, Liu Z, Tu Y, Ma Y, Gu Y. A frog-derived bionic peptide with discriminative inhibition of tumors based on integrin αvβ3 identification. Biomater Sci 2020; 8:5920-5930. [PMID: 32959810 DOI: 10.1039/d0bm01187h] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/21/2022]
Abstract
Aureins, natural active peptides extracted from skin secretions of Australian bell frogs, have become a research focus due to the antitumor effects caused by lysing cell membranes. However, clinical translation of Aureins is still limited by non-selective toxicity between normal and cancer cells. Herein, by structure-activity relationship analysis and rational linker design, a dual-function fusion peptide RA3 is designed by tactically fusing Aurein peptide A1 with strong anticancer activity, with a tri-peptide with integrin αvβ3-binding ability which was screened in our previous work. Rational design and selection of fusion linkers ensures α-helical conformation and active functions of this novel fusion peptide, inducing effective membrane rupture and selective apoptosis of cancer cells. The integrin binding and tumor recognition ability of the fusion peptide is further validated by fluorescence imaging in cell and mouse models, in comparison with the non-selective A1 peptide. Meanwhile, increased stability and superior therapeutic efficacy are achieved in vivo for the RA3 fusion peptide. Our study highlights that aided by computational simulation technologies, the biomimetic fusion RA3 peptide has been successfully designed, surmounting the poor tumor-selectivity of the natural defensive peptide, serving as a promising therapeutic agent for cancer treatment.
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Affiliation(s)
- Zhihao Han
- State Key Laboratory of Natural Medicines, Department of Biomedicine Engineering, School of Engineering, China Pharmaceutical University, Nanjing, No. 24 Tongjia Lane, 210009, China.
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26
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Kumar R, Chhikara BS, Gulia K, Chhillar M. Cleaning the molecular machinery of cells via proteostasis, proteolysis and endocytosis selectively, effectively, and precisely: intracellular self-defense and cellular perturbations. Mol Omics 2020; 17:11-28. [PMID: 33135707 DOI: 10.1039/d0mo00085j] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/18/2022]
Abstract
Network coordinates of cellular processes (proteostasis, proteolysis, and endocytosis), and molecular chaperones are the key complements in the cell machinery and processes. Specifically, cellular pathways are responsible for the conformational maintenance, cellular concentration, interactions, protein synthesis, disposal of misfolded proteins, localization, folding, and degradation. The failure of cellular processes and pathways disturbs structural proteins and the nucleation of amyloids. These mishaps further initiate amyloid polymorphism, transmissibility, co-aggregation of pathogenic proteins in tissues and cells, prion strains, and mechanisms and pathways for toxicity. Consequently, these conditions favor and lead to the formation of elongated amyloid fibrils consisting of many-stranded β-sheets (N,N-terminus and C,C-terminus), and abnormal fibrous, extracellular, proteinaceous deposits. Finally, these β-sheets deposit, and cells fail to degrade them effectively. The essential torsion angles (φ, ψ, and ω) define the conformation of proteins and their architecture. Cells initiate several transformations and pathways during the regulation of protein homeostasis based on the requirements for the functioning of the cell, which are governed by ATP-dependent proteases. In this process, the kinetics of the molding/folding phenomenon is disturbed, and subsequently, it is dominated by cross-domain misfolding intermediates; however, simultaneously, it is opposed by small stretching forces, which naturally exist in the cell. The ubiquitin/proteasome system deals with damaged proteins, which are not refolded by the chaperone-type machinery. Ubiquitin-protein ligases (E3-Ub) participate in all the cellular activity initiated and governed by molecular chaperones to stabilize the cellular proteome and participate in the degradation phenomenon implemented for damaged proteins. Optical tweezers, a single-resolution based technique, disclose the folding pathway of linear chain proteins, which is how they convert themselves into a three-dimensional architecture. Further, DNA-protein conjugation analysis is performed to obtain folding energies as single-molecule kinetic and thermodynamic data.
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Affiliation(s)
- Rajiv Kumar
- NIET, National Institute of Medical Science, India.
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Sanavia T, Birolo G, Montanucci L, Turina P, Capriotti E, Fariselli P. Limitations and challenges in protein stability prediction upon genome variations: towards future applications in precision medicine. Comput Struct Biotechnol J 2020; 18:1968-1979. [PMID: 32774791 PMCID: PMC7397395 DOI: 10.1016/j.csbj.2020.07.011] [Citation(s) in RCA: 72] [Impact Index Per Article: 18.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/15/2020] [Revised: 07/10/2020] [Accepted: 07/14/2020] [Indexed: 12/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Protein stability predictions are becoming essential in medicine to develop novel immunotherapeutic agents and for drug discovery. Despite the large number of computational approaches for predicting the protein stability upon mutation, there are still critical unsolved problems: 1) the limited number of thermodynamic measurements for proteins provided by current databases; 2) the large intrinsic variability of ΔΔG values due to different experimental conditions; 3) biases in the development of predictive methods caused by ignoring the anti-symmetry of ΔΔG values between mutant and native protein forms; 4) over-optimistic prediction performance, due to sequence similarity between proteins used in training and test datasets. Here, we review these issues, highlighting new challenges required to improve current tools and to achieve more reliable predictions. In addition, we provide a perspective of how these methods will be beneficial for designing novel precision medicine approaches for several genetic disorders caused by mutations, such as cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.
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Affiliation(s)
- Tiziana Sanavia
- Department of Medical Sciences, University of Torino, Via Santena 19, 10126 Torino, Italy
| | - Giovanni Birolo
- Department of Medical Sciences, University of Torino, Via Santena 19, 10126 Torino, Italy
| | - Ludovica Montanucci
- Department of Comparative Biomedicine and Food Science (BCA), University of Padova, Viale dell'Università 16, 35020 Legnaro, Italy
| | - Paola Turina
- Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology (FaBiT), University of Bologna, Via F. Selmi 3, 40126 Bologna, Italy
| | - Emidio Capriotti
- Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology (FaBiT), University of Bologna, Via F. Selmi 3, 40126 Bologna, Italy
| | - Piero Fariselli
- Department of Medical Sciences, University of Torino, Via Santena 19, 10126 Torino, Italy
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Caswell RC, Owens MM, Gunning AC, Ellard S, Wright CF. Using Structural Analysis In Silico to Assess the Impact of Missense Variants in MEN1. J Endocr Soc 2019; 3:2258-2275. [PMID: 31737856 PMCID: PMC6846327 DOI: 10.1210/js.2019-00260] [Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/11/2019] [Accepted: 09/20/2019] [Indexed: 12/11/2022] Open
Abstract
Despite the rapid expansion in recent years of databases reporting either benign or pathogenic genetic variations, the interpretation of novel missense variants remains challenging, particularly for clinical or genetic testing laboratories where functional analysis is often unfeasible. Previous studies have shown that thermodynamic analysis of protein structure in silico can discriminate between groups of benign and pathogenic missense variants. However, although structures exist for many human disease‒associated proteins, such analysis remains largely unexploited in clinical laboratories. Here, we analyzed the predicted effect of 338 known missense variants on the structure of menin, the MEN1 gene product. Results provided strong discrimination between pathogenic and benign variants, with a threshold of >4 kcal/mol for the predicted change in stability, providing a strong indicator of pathogenicity. Subsequent analysis of seven novel missense variants identified during clinical testing of patients with MEN1 showed that all seven were predicted to destabilize menin by >4 kcal/mol. We conclude that structural analysis provides a useful tool in understanding the effect of missense variants in MEN1 and that integration of proteomic with genomic data could potentially contribute to the classification of novel variants in this disease.
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Affiliation(s)
- Richard C Caswell
- Institute of Biomedical and Clinical Science, University of Exeter School of Medicine, Exeter, United Kingdom
| | - Martina M Owens
- Department of Molecular Genetics, Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust, Exeter, United Kingdom
| | - Adam C Gunning
- Institute of Biomedical and Clinical Science, University of Exeter School of Medicine, Exeter, United Kingdom
| | - Sian Ellard
- Department of Molecular Genetics, Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust, Exeter, United Kingdom
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Savojardo C, Petrosino M, Babbi G, Bovo S, Corbi-Verge C, Casadio R, Fariselli P, Folkman L, Garg A, Karimi M, Katsonis P, Kim PM, Lichtarge O, Martelli PL, Pasquo A, Pal D, Shen Y, Strokach AV, Turina P, Zhou Y, Andreoletti G, Brenner S, Chiaraluce R, Consalvi V, Capriotti E. Evaluating the predictions of the protein stability change upon single amino acid substitutions for the FXN CAGI5 challenge. Hum Mutat 2019; 40:1392-1399. [PMID: 31209948 PMCID: PMC6744327 DOI: 10.1002/humu.23843] [Citation(s) in RCA: 13] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/16/2019] [Revised: 06/02/2019] [Accepted: 06/09/2019] [Indexed: 12/31/2022]
Abstract
Frataxin (FXN) is a highly conserved protein found in prokaryotes and eukaryotes that is required for efficient regulation of cellular iron homeostasis. Experimental evidence associates amino acid substitutions of the FXN to Friedreich Ataxia, a neurodegenerative disorder. Recently, new thermodynamic experiments have been performed to study the impact of somatic variations identified in cancer tissues on protein stability. The Critical Assessment of Genome Interpretation (CAGI) data provider at the University of Rome measured the unfolding free energy of a set of variants (FXN challenge data set) with far-UV circular dichroism and intrinsic fluorescence spectra. These values have been used to calculate the change in unfolding free energy between the variant and wild-type proteins at zero concentration of denaturant ( Δ Δ G H 2 O ) . The FXN challenge data set, composed of eight amino acid substitutions, was used to evaluate the performance of the current computational methods for predicting the Δ Δ G H 2 O value associated with the variants and to classify them as destabilizing and not destabilizing. For the fifth edition of CAGI, six independent research groups from Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America submitted 12 sets of predictions from different approaches. In this paper, we report the results of our assessment and discuss the limitations of the tested algorithms.
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Affiliation(s)
- Castrense Savojardo
- Biocomputing Group, Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology, University of Bologna, Italy
| | - Maria Petrosino
- Department of Biochemical Sciences “A. Rossi Fanelli”, Sapienza University of Roma, Roma, Italy
| | - Giulia Babbi
- Biocomputing Group, Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology, University of Bologna, Italy
| | - Samuele Bovo
- Biocomputing Group, Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology, University of Bologna, Italy
| | - Carles Corbi-Verge
- Donnelly Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, University of Toronto, 160 College St, Toronto, ON M5S 3E1, Canada
| | - Rita Casadio
- Biocomputing Group, Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology, University of Bologna, Italy
- Institute of Biomembranes, Bioenergetics and Molecular Biotechnologies (IBIOM), Italian National Research Council (CNR), Bari, Italy
| | - Piero Fariselli
- Department of Medical Sciences University of Torino, 10126 Torino, Italy
| | - Lukas Folkman
- School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University, Parklands Dr, Southport, QLD 4222, Australia
| | - Aditi Garg
- Department of Computational and Data Sciences. Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru 560 012, India
| | - Mostafa Karimi
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77840, USA
| | - Panagiotis Katsonis
- Department of Molecular and Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas 77030, USA
| | - Philip M. Kim
- Donnelly Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, University of Toronto, 160 College St, Toronto, ON M5S 3E1, Canada
- Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, 1 King’s College Cir, Toronto, ON M5S 1A8, Canada
- Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, 214 College St, Toronto, ON M5T 3A1, Canada
| | - Olivier Lichtarge
- Department of Molecular and Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas 77030, USA
- Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas 77030, USA
- Department of Pharmacology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas 77030, USA
- Computational and Integrative Biomedical Research Center, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas 77030, USA
| | - Pier Luigi Martelli
- Biocomputing Group, Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology, University of Bologna, Italy
| | - Alessandra Pasquo
- ENEA CR Frascati, Diagnostics and Metrology Laboratory,FSN-TECFIS-DIM, Frascati, Italy
| | - Debnath Pal
- Department of Computational and Data Sciences. Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru 560 012, India
| | - Yang Shen
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77840, USA
| | - Alexey V. Strokach
- Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, 214 College St, Toronto, ON M5T 3A1, Canada
| | - Paola Turina
- Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology, University of Bologna, 40126 Bologna, Italy
| | - Yaoqi Zhou
- School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University, Parklands Dr, Southport, QLD 4222, Australia
- Institute for Glycomics, Griffith University, Parklands Dr, Southport QLD 4222, Australia
| | - Gaia Andreoletti
- Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
| | - Steven Brenner
- Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
| | - Roberta Chiaraluce
- Department of Biochemical Sciences “A. Rossi Fanelli”, Sapienza University of Roma, Roma, Italy
| | - Valerio Consalvi
- Department of Biochemical Sciences “A. Rossi Fanelli”, Sapienza University of Roma, Roma, Italy
| | - Emidio Capriotti
- Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology, University of Bologna, 40126 Bologna, Italy
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Montanucci L, Capriotti E, Frank Y, Ben-Tal N, Fariselli P. DDGun: an untrained method for the prediction of protein stability changes upon single and multiple point variations. BMC Bioinformatics 2019; 20:335. [PMID: 31266447 PMCID: PMC6606456 DOI: 10.1186/s12859-019-2923-1] [Citation(s) in RCA: 64] [Impact Index Per Article: 12.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/20/2022] Open
Abstract
Background Predicting the effect of single point variations on protein stability constitutes a crucial step toward understanding the relationship between protein structure and function. To this end, several methods have been developed to predict changes in the Gibbs free energy of unfolding (∆∆G) between wild type and variant proteins, using sequence and structure information. Most of the available methods however do not exhibit the anti-symmetric prediction property, which guarantees that the predicted ∆∆G value for a variation is the exact opposite of that predicted for the reverse variation, i.e., ∆∆G(A → B) = −∆∆G(B → A), where A and B are amino acids. Results Here we introduce simple anti-symmetric features, based on evolutionary information, which are combined to define an untrained method, DDGun (DDG untrained). DDGun is a simple approach based on evolutionary information that predicts the ∆∆G for single and multiple variations from sequence and structure information (DDGun3D). Our method achieves remarkable performance without any training on the experimental datasets, reaching Pearson correlation coefficients between predicted and measured ∆∆G values of ~ 0.5 and ~ 0.4 for single and multiple site variations, respectively. Surprisingly, DDGun performances are comparable with those of state of the art methods. DDGun also naturally predicts multiple site variations, thereby defining a benchmark method for both single site and multiple site predictors. DDGun is anti-symmetric by construction predicting the value of the ∆∆G of a reciprocal variation as almost equal (depending on the sequence profile) to -∆∆G of the direct variation. This is a valuable property that is missing in the majority of the methods. Conclusions Evolutionary information alone combined in an untrained method can achieve remarkably high performances in the prediction of ∆∆G upon protein mutation. Non-trained approaches like DDGun represent a valid benchmark both for scoring the predictive power of the individual features and for assessing the learning capability of supervised methods. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12859-019-2923-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ludovica Montanucci
- Department of Comparative Biomedicine and Food Science (BCA), University of Padova, Viale dell'Università 16, 35020, Legnaro, Italy
| | - Emidio Capriotti
- BioFolD Unit, Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology (FaBiT), University of Bologna, Via Selmi 3, 40126, Bologna, Italy.
| | - Yotam Frank
- Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, 69978, Tel Aviv, Israel
| | - Nir Ben-Tal
- Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, 69978, Tel Aviv, Israel
| | - Piero Fariselli
- Department of Comparative Biomedicine and Food Science (BCA), University of Padova, Viale dell'Università 16, 35020, Legnaro, Italy. .,Now at the Department of Medical Sciences, University of Torino, via Santena 19, 10126, Torino, Italy.
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31
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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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Capriotti E, Ozturk K, Carter H. Integrating molecular networks with genetic variant interpretation for precision medicine. WILEY INTERDISCIPLINARY REVIEWS-SYSTEMS BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE 2018; 11:e1443. [PMID: 30548534 PMCID: PMC6450710 DOI: 10.1002/wsbm.1443] [Citation(s) in RCA: 24] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/15/2018] [Revised: 10/23/2018] [Accepted: 10/30/2018] [Indexed: 02/01/2023]
Abstract
More reliable and cheaper sequencing technologies have revealed the vast mutational landscapes characteristic of many phenotypes. The analysis of such genetic variants has led to successful identification of altered proteins underlying many Mendelian disorders. Nevertheless the simple one‐variant one‐phenotype model valid for many monogenic diseases does not capture the complexity of polygenic traits and disorders. Although experimental and computational approaches have improved detection of functionally deleterious variants and important interactions between gene products, the development of comprehensive models relating genotype and phenotypes remains a challenge in the field of genomic medicine. In this context, a new view of the pathologic state as significant perturbation of the network of interactions between biomolecules is crucial for the identification of biochemical pathways associated with complex phenotypes. Seminal studies in systems biology combined the analysis of genetic variation with protein–protein interaction networks to demonstrate that even as biological systems evolve to be robust to genetic variation, their topologies create disease vulnerabilities. More recent analyses model the impact of genetic variants as changes to the “wiring” of the interactome to better capture heterogeneity in genotype–phenotype relationships. These studies lay the foundation for using networks to predict variant effects at scale using machine‐learning or algorithmic approaches. A wealth of databases and resources for the annotation of genotype–phenotype relationships have been developed to support developments in this area. This overview describes how study of the molecular interactome has generated insights linking the organization of biological systems to disease mechanism, and how this information can enable precision medicine. This article is categorized under:
Translational, Genomic, and Systems Medicine > Translational Medicine Biological Mechanisms > Cell Signaling Models of Systems Properties and Processes > Mechanistic Models Analytical and Computational Methods > Computational Methods
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Affiliation(s)
- Emidio Capriotti
- Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology (FaBiT), University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
| | - Kivilcim Ozturk
- Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Program, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California
| | - Hannah Carter
- Department of Medicine and Institute for Genomic Medicine, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California
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Lee ME, Dou X, Zhu Y, Phillips KJ. Refolding Proteins from Inclusion Bodies using Differential Scanning Fluorimetry Guided (DGR) Protein Refolding and MeltTraceur Web. ACTA ACUST UNITED AC 2018; 125:e78. [DOI: 10.1002/cpmb.78] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/20/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Mark E. Lee
- Baylor College of Medicine, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology; Houston Texas
| | - Xiaoyi Dou
- Baylor College of Medicine, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology; Houston Texas
- Vanderbilt University, Department of Computer Science; Nashville Tennessee
| | - Yingmin Zhu
- Baylor College of Medicine, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology; Houston Texas
- Baylor College of Medicine, Protein and Monoclonal Antibody Production Core; Houston Texas
| | - Kevin J. Phillips
- Baylor College of Medicine, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology; Houston Texas
- Baylor College of Medicine, Protein and Monoclonal Antibody Production Core; Houston Texas
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Sun YZ, Chen XB, Wang RR, Li WY, Ma Y. Exploring the effect of N308D mutation on protein tyrosine phosphatase-2 cause gain-of-function activity by a molecular dynamics study. J Cell Biochem 2018; 120:5949-5961. [PMID: 30304563 DOI: 10.1002/jcb.27883] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/02/2018] [Accepted: 09/19/2018] [Indexed: 01/27/2023]
Abstract
One of the most common protein tyrosine phosphatase-2 (SHP2) mutations in Noonan syndrome is the N308D mutation, and it increases the activity of the protein. However, the molecular basis of the activation of N308D mutation on SHP2 conformations is poorly understood. Here, molecular dynamic simulations were performed on SHP2 and SHP2-N308D to explore the effect of N308D mutation on SHP2 cause gain of function activity, respectively. The principal component analysis, dynamic cross-correlation map, secondary structure analysis, residue interaction networks, and solvent accessible surface area analysis suggested that the N308D mutation distorted the residues interactions network between the allosteric site (residue Gly244-Gly246) and C-SH2 domain, including the hydrogen bond formation and the binding energy. Meanwhile, the activity of catalytic site (residue Gly503-Val505) located in the Q-loop in mutant increased due to this region's high fluctuations. Therefore, the substrate had more chances to access to the catalytic activity site of the precision time protocol domain of SHP2-N308D, which was easy to be exposed. In addition, we had speculated that the Lys244 located in the allosteric site was the key residue which lead to the protein conformation changes. Consequently, overall calculations presented in this study ultimately provide a useful understanding of the increased activity of SHP2 caused by the N308D mutation.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ying-Zhan Sun
- Tianjin Key Laboratory on Technologies Enabling Development of Clinical Therapeutics and Diagnostics (Theranostics), School of Pharmacy, Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin, China
| | - Xiu-Bo Chen
- Tianjin Key Laboratory on Technologies Enabling Development of Clinical Therapeutics and Diagnostics (Theranostics), School of Pharmacy, Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin, China.,Eye Hospital, Tianjin Medical University, School of Optometry and Ophthalmology, Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin, China
| | - Rui-Rui Wang
- Tianjin Key Laboratory on Technologies Enabling Development of Clinical Therapeutics and Diagnostics (Theranostics), School of Pharmacy, Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin, China
| | - Wei-Ya Li
- Tianjin Key Laboratory on Technologies Enabling Development of Clinical Therapeutics and Diagnostics (Theranostics), School of Pharmacy, Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin, China
| | - Ying Ma
- Tianjin Key Laboratory on Technologies Enabling Development of Clinical Therapeutics and Diagnostics (Theranostics), School of Pharmacy, Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin, China
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Kozak JJ, Gray HB, Wittung-Stafshede P. Geometrical Description of Protein Structural Motifs. J Phys Chem B 2018; 122:11289-11294. [PMID: 30141936 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcb.8b07130] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/20/2023]
Abstract
We present a geometrical method that can identify secondary structural motifs in proteins via angular correlations. The method uses crystal structure coordinates to calculate angular and radial signatures of each residue relative to an external reference point as the number of nearest-neighbor residues increases. We apply our approach to the blue copper protein amicyanin using the copper cofactor as the external reference point. We define a signature termed Δβ which describes the change in angular correlation as the span of nearest neighbor residues increases. We find that three turn regions of amicyanin harbor residues with Δβ near zero, while residues in other secondary structures have Δβ greater than zero: for β-strands, Δβ changes gradually residue by residue along the strand. Extension of our analysis to other blue copper proteins demonstrated that the noted structural trends are general. Importantly, our geometrical description of the folded protein accounts for all forces holding the structure together. Through this analysis, we identified some of the turns in amicyanin as symmetrical anchor points.
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Affiliation(s)
- John J Kozak
- Department of Chemistry , DePaul University , Chicago , Illinois 60604-6116 , United States
| | - Harry B Gray
- Beckman Institute , California Institute of Technology , Pasadena , California 91125 , United States
| | - Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede
- Department of Biology and Biological Engineering , Chalmers University of Technology , 41296 Gothenburg , Sweden
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36
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Olotu FA, Soliman MES. From mutational inactivation to aberrant gain-of-function: Unraveling the structural basis of mutant p53 oncogenic transition. J Cell Biochem 2017; 119:2646-2652. [PMID: 29058783 DOI: 10.1002/jcb.26430] [Citation(s) in RCA: 38] [Impact Index Per Article: 5.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/21/2017] [Accepted: 10/18/2017] [Indexed: 01/15/2023]
Abstract
Various evidence has revealed that mutations in p53 exert activities that go beyond simply inactivation of wildtype functions but rather elicits downstream interactions that promote malignancy described as mutant p53 gain-of-function (GOF). Here we report the first account of the dynamics of mutation-induced structural transition of native p53 to an aberrant gain-of-function state, studying the wildtype (WT) and high incidence contact (R273C) and structural (R175H) mutant p53 (mutp53) through molecular dynamics simulation. Result analysis revealed that both mutants exhibited structural distortion and reduced flexibility, indicative of rigidity and kinetic stability. In addition, surface analysis revealed an increase in the accessible surface area in the p53 mutants. This suggests that the GOF transition involves protein unfolding and exposure of buried hydrophobic surface essential for interaction with HSF-1 oncogenic partner and wildtype p63, and p73 homologs. Further validation revealed binding cavities, similar in the mutants but dissimilar to the WT. Taken together, this study complements experimental findings and reveals the interplay between mutation-induced structural distortion, loss of flexibility, rigidity, enhanced stability, protein unfolding and ultimately, exposure of binding surfaces as conformational attributes that characterize mutP53 structure-GOF activities. This insight is, therefore, of great importance as it opens up a novel therapeutic approach toward the structure based targeting of mutP53 oncogenic involvement beyond wildtype inactivation. Furthermore, "exposed" binding site information obtained from this study can be explored for structure-based design of substances best described as "destabilizers" to disrupt the GOF interaction of mutp53.
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Affiliation(s)
- Fisayo A Olotu
- Molecular Modeling and Drug Design Research Group, School of Health Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville Campus, Durban, South Africa
| | - Mahmoud E S Soliman
- Molecular Modeling and Drug Design Research Group, School of Health Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville Campus, Durban, South Africa.,College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, FAMU, Tallahassee, Florida.,Faculty of Pharmacy, Department of Pharmaceutical Organic Chemistry, Zagazig University, Zagazig, Egypt
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37
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Carpinteri A, Lacidogna G, Piana G, Bassani A. Terahertz mechanical vibrations in lysozyme: Raman spectroscopy vs modal analysis. J Mol Struct 2017. [DOI: 10.1016/j.molstruc.2017.02.099] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/19/2022]
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Goyal B, Srivastava KR, Durani S. N-terminal diproline and charge group effects on the stabilization of helical conformation in alanine-based short peptides: CD studies with water and methanol as solvent. J Pept Sci 2017; 23:431-437. [PMID: 28425159 DOI: 10.1002/psc.3005] [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: 12/08/2016] [Revised: 03/17/2017] [Accepted: 03/20/2017] [Indexed: 12/25/2022]
Abstract
Protein folding problem remains a formidable challenge as main chain, side chain and solvent interactions remain entangled and have been difficult to resolve. Alanine-based short peptides are promising models to dissect protein folding initiation and propagation structurally as well as energetically. The effect of N-terminal diproline and charged side chains is assessed on the stabilization of helical conformation in alanine-based short peptides using circular dichroism (CD) with water and methanol as solvent. A1 (Ac-Pro-Pro-Ala-Lys-Ala-Lys-Ala-Lys-Ala-NH2 ) is designed to assess the effect of N-terminal homochiral diproline and lysine side chains to induce helical conformation. A2 (Ac-Pro-Pro-Glu-Glu-Ala-Ala-Lys-Lys-Ala-NH2 ) and A3 (Ac-dPro-Pro-Glu-Glu-Ala-Ala-Lys-Lys-Ala-NH2 ) with N-terminal homochiral and heterochiral diproline, respectively, are designed to assess the effect of Glu...Lys (i, i + 4) salt bridge interactions on the stabilization of helical conformation. The CD spectra of A1, A2 and A3 in water manifest different amplitudes of the observed polyproline II (PPII) signals, which indicate different conformational distributions of the polypeptide structure. The strong effect of solvent substitution from water to methanol is observed for the peptides, and CD spectra in methanol evidence A2 and A3 as helical folds. Temperature-dependent CD spectra of A1 and A2 in water depict an isodichroic point reflecting coexistence of two conformations, PPII and β-strand conformation, which is consistent with the previous studies. The results illuminate the effect of N-terminal diproline and charged side chains in dictating the preferences for extended-β, semi-extended PPII and helical conformation in alanine-based short peptides. The results of the present study will enhance our understanding on stabilization of helical conformation in short peptides and hence aid in the design of novel peptides with helical structures. Copyright © 2017 European Peptide Society and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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Affiliation(s)
- Bhupesh Goyal
- Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai, 400076, India.,Department of Chemistry, School of Basic and Applied Sciences, Sri Guru Granth Sahib World University, Fatehgarh Sahib, 140406, Punjab, India
| | - Kinshuk Raj Srivastava
- Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai, 400076, India.,Life Sciences Institute, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48105, USA
| | - Susheel Durani
- Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai, 400076, India
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Goyal B, Srivastava KR, Durani S. Examination of the Effect of N-terminal Diproline and Charged Side Chains on the Stabilization of Helical Conformation in Alanine-based Short Peptides: A Molecular Dynamics Study. ChemistrySelect 2016. [DOI: 10.1002/slct.201601381] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/10/2023]
Affiliation(s)
- Bhupesh Goyal
- Department of Chemistry; Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai; Mumbai-400076 India
- Department of Chemistry; School of Basic and Applied Sciences; Sri Guru Granth Sahib World University, Fatehgarh; Sahib-140406, Punjab India
| | - Kinshuk Raj Srivastava
- Department of Chemistry; Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai; Mumbai-400076 India
- Life Sciences Institute; University of Michigan; Ann Arbor, MI USA 48105
| | - Susheel Durani
- Department of Chemistry; Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai; Mumbai-400076 India
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40
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Jose KVJ, Raghavachari K. Molecules-in-molecules fragment-based method for the calculation of chiroptical spectra of large molecules: Vibrational circular dichroism and Raman optical activity spectra of alanine polypeptides. Chirality 2016; 28:755-768. [DOI: 10.1002/chir.22651] [Citation(s) in RCA: 14] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/03/2016] [Revised: 08/29/2016] [Accepted: 08/30/2016] [Indexed: 12/17/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- K. V. Jovan Jose
- Department of Chemistry; Indiana University; Bloomington Indiana USA
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41
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Molecular dynamics simulations and docking enable to explore the biophysical factors controlling the yields of engineered nanobodies. Sci Rep 2016; 6:34869. [PMID: 27721441 PMCID: PMC5056509 DOI: 10.1038/srep34869] [Citation(s) in RCA: 22] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/05/2016] [Accepted: 09/20/2016] [Indexed: 02/08/2023] Open
Abstract
Nanobodies (VHHs) have proved to be valuable substitutes of conventional antibodies for molecular recognition. Their small size represents a precious advantage for rational mutagenesis based on modelling. Here we address the problem of predicting how Camelidae nanobody sequences can tolerate mutations by developing a simulation protocol based on all-atom molecular dynamics and whole-molecule docking. The method was tested on two sets of nanobodies characterized experimentally for their biophysical features. One set contained point mutations introduced to humanize a wild type sequence, in the second the CDRs were swapped between single-domain frameworks with Camelidae and human hallmarks. The method resulted in accurate scoring approaches to predict experimental yields and enabled to identify the structural modifications induced by mutations. This work is a promising tool for the in silico development of single-domain antibodies and opens the opportunity to customize single functional domains of larger macromolecules.
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Tang H, Thomas PD. Tools for Predicting the Functional Impact of Nonsynonymous Genetic Variation. Genetics 2016; 203:635-47. [PMID: 27270698 PMCID: PMC4896183 DOI: 10.1534/genetics.116.190033] [Citation(s) in RCA: 77] [Impact Index Per Article: 9.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/04/2015] [Accepted: 04/01/2016] [Indexed: 01/09/2023] Open
Abstract
As personal genome sequencing becomes a reality, understanding the effects of genetic variants on phenotype-particularly the impact of germline variants on disease risk and the impact of somatic variants on cancer development and treatment-continues to increase in importance. Because of their clear potential for affecting phenotype, nonsynonymous genetic variants (variants that cause a change in the amino acid sequence of a protein encoded by a gene) have long been the target of efforts to predict the effects of genetic variation. Whole-genome sequencing is identifying large numbers of nonsynonymous variants in each genome, intensifying the need for computational methods that accurately predict which of these are likely to impact disease phenotypes. This review focuses on nonsynonymous variant prediction with two aims in mind: (1) to review the prioritization methods that have been developed to date and the principles on which they are based and (2) to discuss the challenges to further improving these methods.
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Affiliation(s)
- Haiming Tang
- Division of Bioinformatics, Department of Preventive Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90033
| | - Paul D Thomas
- Division of Bioinformatics, Department of Preventive Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90033
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43
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Stauch T, Hoffmann MT, Dreuw A. Spectroscopic Monitoring of Mechanical Forces during Protein Folding by using Molecular Force Probes. Chemphyschem 2016; 17:1486-92. [PMID: 26928925 DOI: 10.1002/cphc.201600016] [Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/07/2016] [Indexed: 11/08/2022]
Abstract
Detailed folding pathways of proteins are still largely unknown. Real-time monitoring of mechanical forces acting in proteins during structural transitions would provide deep insights into these highly complex processes. Here, we propose two molecular force probes that can be incorporated into the protein backbone to gain insight into the magnitude and direction of mechanical forces acting in proteins during natural folding and unfolding through their optical spectroscopic response. In fact, changes in the infrared and Raman spectra are proportional to the mechanical force deforming the force probes, and the relevant bands can be intensified and shifted to a transparent window in the protein spectrum by isotopic substitution. As a result, the proposed molecular force probes can act as "force rulers", allowing the spectroscopic observation and measurement of mechanical forces acting within the proteins under natural conditions without external perturbation.
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Affiliation(s)
- Tim Stauch
- Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing, University of Heidelberg, Im Neuenheimer Feld 368, 69120, Heidelberg, Germany.
| | - Marvin T Hoffmann
- Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing, University of Heidelberg, Im Neuenheimer Feld 368, 69120, Heidelberg, Germany
| | - Andreas Dreuw
- Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing, University of Heidelberg, Im Neuenheimer Feld 368, 69120, Heidelberg, Germany
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Deller MC, Kong L, Rupp B. Protein stability: a crystallographer's perspective. ACTA CRYSTALLOGRAPHICA SECTION F-STRUCTURAL BIOLOGY COMMUNICATIONS 2016; 72:72-95. [PMID: 26841758 PMCID: PMC4741188 DOI: 10.1107/s2053230x15024619] [Citation(s) in RCA: 140] [Impact Index Per Article: 17.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/27/2015] [Accepted: 12/21/2015] [Indexed: 12/18/2022]
Abstract
Protein stability is a topic of major interest for the biotechnology, pharmaceutical and food industries, in addition to being a daily consideration for academic researchers studying proteins. An understanding of protein stability is essential for optimizing the expression, purification, formulation, storage and structural studies of proteins. In this review, discussion will focus on factors affecting protein stability, on a somewhat practical level, particularly from the view of a protein crystallographer. The differences between protein conformational stability and protein compositional stability will be discussed, along with a brief introduction to key methods useful for analyzing protein stability. Finally, tactics for addressing protein-stability issues during protein expression, purification and crystallization will be discussed.
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Affiliation(s)
- Marc C Deller
- Stanford ChEM-H, Macromolecular Structure Knowledge Center, Stanford University, Shriram Center, 443 Via Ortega, Room 097, MC5082, Stanford, CA 94305-4125, USA
| | - Leopold Kong
- Laboratory of Cell and Molecular Biology, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Building 8, Room 1A03, 8 Center Drive, Bethesda, MD 20814, USA
| | - Bernhard Rupp
- Department of Forensic Crystallography, k.-k. Hofkristallamt, 91 Audrey Place, Vista, CA 92084, USA
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Kelly CM, Muzard J, Brooks BR, Lee GU, Buchete NV. Structure and dynamics of the fibronectin-III domains of Aplysia californica cell adhesion molecules. Phys Chem Chem Phys 2016; 17:9634-43. [PMID: 25729787 DOI: 10.1039/c4cp05307a] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/28/2022]
Abstract
Due to their homophilic and heterophilic binding properties, cell adhesion molecules (CAMs) such as integrin, cadherin and the immunoglobulin superfamily CAMs are of primary importance in cell-cell and cell-substrate interactions, signalling pathways and other crucial biological processes. We study the molecular structures and conformational dynamics of the two fibronectin type III (Fn-III) extracellular domains of the Aplysia californica CAM (apCAM) protein, by constructing and probing an atomically-detailed structural model based on apCAM's homology with other CAMs. The stability and dynamic properties of the Fn-III domains, individually and in tandem, are probed and analysed using all-atom explicit-solvent molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and normal mode analysis of their corresponding elastic network models. The refined structural model of the Fn-III tandem of apCAM reveals a specific pattern of amino acid interactions that controls the stability of the β-sheet rich structure and could affect apCAM's response to physical or chemical changes of its environment. It also exposes the important role of several specific charged residues in modulating the structural properties of the linker segment connecting the two Fn-III domains, as well as of the inter-domain interface.
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Affiliation(s)
- Catherine M Kelly
- School of Physics, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland.
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Pottel J, Moitessier N. Single-Point Mutation with a Rotamer Library Toolkit: Toward Protein Engineering. J Chem Inf Model 2015; 55:2657-71. [PMID: 26623941 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jcim.5b00525] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/25/2022]
Abstract
Protein engineers have long been hard at work to harness biocatalysts as a natural source of regio-, stereo-, and chemoselectivity in order to carry out chemistry (reactions and/or substrates) not previously achieved with these enzymes. The extreme labor demands and exponential number of mutation combinations have induced computational advances in this domain. The first step in our virtual approach is to predict the correct conformations upon mutation of residues (i.e., rebuilding side chains). For this purpose, we opted for a combination of molecular mechanics and statistical data. In this work, we have developed automated computational tools to extract protein structural information and created conformational libraries for each amino acid dependent on a variable number of parameters (e.g., resolution, flexibility, secondary structure). We have also developed the necessary tool to apply the mutation and optimize the conformation accordingly. For side-chain conformation prediction, we obtained overall average root-mean-square deviations (RMSDs) of 0.91 and 1.01 Å for the 18 flexible natural amino acids within two distinct sets of over 3000 and 1500 side-chain residues, respectively. The commonly used dihedral angle differences were also evaluated and performed worse than the state of the art. These two metrics are also compared. Furthermore, we generated a family-specific library for kinases that produced an average 2% lower RMSD upon side-chain reconstruction and a residue-specific library that yielded a 17% improvement. Ultimately, since our protein engineering outlook involves using our docking software, Fitted/Impacts, we applied our mutation protocol to a benchmarked data set for self- and cross-docking. Our side-chain reconstruction does not hinder our docking software, demonstrating differences in pose prediction accuracy of approximately 2% (RMSD cutoff metric) for a set of over 200 protein/ligand structures. Similarly, when docking to a set of over 100 kinases, side-chain reconstruction (using both general and biased conformation libraries) had minimal detriment to the docking accuracy.
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Affiliation(s)
- Joshua Pottel
- Department of Chemistry, McGill University , 801 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, QC, Canada H3A 0B8
| | - Nicolas Moitessier
- Department of Chemistry, McGill University , 801 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, QC, Canada H3A 0B8
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47
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Pancsa R, Varadi M, Tompa P, Vranken WF. Start2Fold: a database of hydrogen/deuterium exchange data on protein folding and stability. Nucleic Acids Res 2015; 44:D429-34. [PMID: 26582925 PMCID: PMC4702845 DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkv1185] [Citation(s) in RCA: 25] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/15/2015] [Accepted: 10/24/2015] [Indexed: 01/02/2023] Open
Abstract
Proteins fulfil a wide range of tasks in cells; understanding how they fold into complex three-dimensional (3D) structures and how these structures remain stable while retaining sufficient dynamics for functionality is essential for the interpretation of overall protein behaviour. Since the 1950's, solvent exchange-based methods have been the most powerful experimental means to obtain information on the folding and stability of proteins. Considerable expertise and care were required to obtain the resulting datasets, which, despite their importance and intrinsic value, have never been collected, curated and classified. Start2Fold is an openly accessible database (http://start2fold.eu) of carefully curated hydrogen/deuterium exchange (HDX) data extracted from the literature that is open for new submissions from the community. The database entries contain (i) information on the proteins investigated and the underlying experimental procedures and (ii) the classification of the residues based on their exchange protection levels, also allowing for the instant visualization of the relevant residue groups on the 3D structures of the corresponding proteins. By providing a clear hierarchical framework for the easy sharing, comparison and (re-)interpretation of HDX data, Start2Fold intends to promote a better understanding of how the protein sequence encodes folding and structure as well as the development of new computational methods predicting protein folding and stability.
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Affiliation(s)
- Rita Pancsa
- Structural Biology Brussels, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Brussels 1050, Belgium Structural Biology Research Center (IB), VIB, Brussels 1050, Belgium
| | - Mihaly Varadi
- Structural Biology Brussels, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Brussels 1050, Belgium Structural Biology Research Center (IB), VIB, Brussels 1050, Belgium
| | - Peter Tompa
- Structural Biology Brussels, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Brussels 1050, Belgium Structural Biology Research Center (IB), VIB, Brussels 1050, Belgium Interuniversity Institute of Bioinformatics in Brussels (IB), ULB-VUB, Brussels 1050, Belgium Institute of Enzymology, Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest 1113, Hungary
| | - Wim F Vranken
- Structural Biology Brussels, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Brussels 1050, Belgium Structural Biology Research Center (IB), VIB, Brussels 1050, Belgium Interuniversity Institute of Bioinformatics in Brussels (IB), ULB-VUB, Brussels 1050, Belgium
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48
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Tian R, Basu MK, Capriotti E. Computational methods and resources for the interpretation of genomic variants in cancer. BMC Genomics 2015; 16 Suppl 8:S7. [PMID: 26111056 PMCID: PMC4480958 DOI: 10.1186/1471-2164-16-s8-s7] [Citation(s) in RCA: 15] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/31/2022] Open
Abstract
The recent improvement of the high-throughput sequencing technologies is having a strong impact on the detection of genetic variations associated with cancer. Several institutions worldwide have been sequencing the whole exomes and or genomes of cancer patients in the thousands, thereby providing an invaluable collection of new somatic mutations in different cancer types. These initiatives promoted the development of methods and tools for the analysis of cancer genomes that are aimed at studying the relationship between genotype and phenotype in cancer. In this article we review the online resources and computational tools for the analysis of cancer genome. First, we describe the available repositories of cancer genome data. Next, we provide an overview of the methods for the detection of genetic variation and computational tools for the prioritization of cancer related genes and causative somatic variations. Finally, we discuss the future perspectives in cancer genomics focusing on the impact of computational methods and quantitative approaches for defining personalized strategies to improve the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.
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Smith JE, Mowles AK, Mehta AK, Lynn DG. Looked at life from both sides now. Life (Basel) 2014; 4:887-902. [PMID: 25513758 PMCID: PMC4284472 DOI: 10.3390/life4040887] [Citation(s) in RCA: 17] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/12/2014] [Revised: 12/01/2014] [Accepted: 12/02/2014] [Indexed: 01/25/2023] Open
Abstract
As the molecular top–down causality emerging through comparative genomics is combined with the bottom–up dynamic chemical networks of biochemistry, the molecular symbiotic relationships driving growth of the tree of life becomes strikingly apparent. These symbioses can be mutualistic or parasitic across many levels, but most foundational is the complex and intricate mutualism of nucleic acids and proteins known as the central dogma of biological information flow. This unification of digital and analog molecular information within a common chemical network enables processing of the vast amounts of information necessary for cellular life. Here we consider the molecular information pathways of these dynamic biopolymer networks from the perspective of their evolution and use that perspective to inform and constrain pathways for the construction of mutualistic polymers.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jillian E Smith
- Department of Chemistry and Biology, Emory University, 1515 Dickey Drive, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA.
| | - Allisandra K Mowles
- Department of Chemistry and Biology, Emory University, 1515 Dickey Drive, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA.
| | - Anil K Mehta
- Department of Chemistry and Biology, Emory University, 1515 Dickey Drive, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA.
| | - David G Lynn
- Department of Chemistry and Biology, Emory University, 1515 Dickey Drive, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA.
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