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Length matters: Functional flip of the short TatA transmembrane helix. Biophys J 2022:S0006-3495(22)03926-1. [PMID: 36523158 DOI: 10.1016/j.bpj.2022.12.016] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/26/2022] [Revised: 12/01/2022] [Accepted: 12/12/2022] [Indexed: 12/23/2022] Open
Abstract
The twin arginine translocase (Tat) exports folded proteins across bacterial membranes. The putative pore-forming or membrane-weakening component (TatAd in B. subtilis) is anchored to the lipid bilayer via an unusually short transmembrane α-helix (TMH), with less than 16 residues. Its tilt angle in different membranes was analyzed under hydrophobic mismatch conditions, using synchrotron radiation circular dichroism and solid-state NMR. Positive mismatch (introduced either by reconstitution in short-chain lipids or by extending the hydrophobic TMH length) increased the helix tilt of the TMH as expected. Negative mismatch (introduced either by reconstitution in long-chain lipids or by shortening the TMH), on the other hand, led to protein aggregation. These data suggest that the TMH of TatA is just about long enough for stable membrane insertion. At the same time, its short length is a crucial factor for successful translocation, as demonstrated here in native membrane vesicles using an in vitro translocation assay. Furthermore, when reconstituted in model membranes with negative spontaneous curvature, the TMH was found to be aligned parallel to the membrane surface. This intrinsic ability of TatA to flip out of the membrane core thus seems to play a key role in its membrane-destabilizing effect during Tat-dependent translocation.
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Heilmann N, Wolf M, Kozlowska M, Sedghamiz E, Setzler J, Brieg M, Wenzel W. Sampling of the conformational landscape of small proteins with Monte Carlo methods. Sci Rep 2020; 10:18211. [PMID: 33097750 PMCID: PMC7585447 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-75239-7] [Citation(s) in RCA: 18] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/15/2020] [Accepted: 10/12/2020] [Indexed: 12/24/2022] Open
Abstract
Computer simulation provides an increasingly realistic picture of large-scale conformational change of proteins, but investigations remain fundamentally constrained by the femtosecond timestep of molecular dynamics simulations. For this reason, many biologically interesting questions cannot be addressed using accessible state-of-the-art computational resources. Here, we report the development of an all-atom Monte Carlo approach that permits the modelling of the large-scale conformational change of proteins using standard off-the-shelf computational hardware and standard all-atom force fields. We demonstrate extensive thermodynamic characterization of the folding process of the α-helical Trp-cage, the Villin headpiece and the β-sheet WW-domain. We fully characterize the free energy landscape, transition states, energy barriers between different states, and the per-residue stability of individual amino acids over a wide temperature range. We demonstrate that a state-of-the-art intramolecular force field can be combined with an implicit solvent model to obtain a high quality of the folded structures and also discuss limitations that still remain.
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Affiliation(s)
- Nana Heilmann
- Institute of Nanotechnology (INT), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Platz 1, 76344, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany
| | - Moritz Wolf
- Institute of Nanotechnology (INT), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Platz 1, 76344, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany
| | - Mariana Kozlowska
- Institute of Nanotechnology (INT), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Platz 1, 76344, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany
| | - Elaheh Sedghamiz
- Institute of Nanotechnology (INT), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Platz 1, 76344, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany
| | - Julia Setzler
- Institute of Nanotechnology (INT), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Platz 1, 76344, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany
| | - Martin Brieg
- Institute of Nanotechnology (INT), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Platz 1, 76344, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany
| | - Wolfgang Wenzel
- Institute of Nanotechnology (INT), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Platz 1, 76344, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany.
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Horvath D, Marcou G, Varnek A. "Big Data" Fast Chemoinformatics Model to Predict Generalized Born Radius and Solvent Accessibility as a Function of Geometry. J Chem Inf Model 2020; 60:2951-2965. [PMID: 32374171 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jcim.9b01172] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
Abstract
The Generalized Born (GB) solvent model is offering the best accuracy/computing effort ratio yet requires drastic simplifications to estimate of the Effective Born Radii (EBR) in bypassing a too expensive volume integration step. EBRs are a measure of the degree of burial of an atom and not very sensitive to small changes of geometry: in molecular dynamics, the costly EBR update procedure is not mandatory at every step. This work however aims at implementing a GB model into the Sampler for Multiple Protein-Ligand Entities (S4MPLE) evolutionary algorithm with mandatory EBR updates at each step triggering arbitrarily large geometric changes. Therefore, a quantitative structure-property relationship has been developed in order to express the EBRs as a linear function of both the topological neighborhood and geometric occupancy of the space around atoms. A training set of 810 molecular systems, starting from fragment-like to drug-like compounds, proteins, host-guest systems, and ligand-protein complexes, has been compiled. For each species, S4MPLE generated several hundreds of random conformers. For each atom in each geometry of each species, its "standard" EBR was calculated by numeric integration and associated to topological and geometric descriptors of the atom neighborhood. This training set (EBR, atom descriptors) involving >5 M entries was subjected to a boot-strapping multilinear regression process with descriptor selection. In parallel, the strategy was repurposed to also learn atomic solvent-accessible areas (SA) based on the same descriptors. Resulting linear equations were challenged to predict EBR and SA values for a similarly compiled external set of >2000 new molecular systems. Solvation energies calculated with estimated EBR and SA match "standard" energies within the typical error of a force-field-based approach (a few kilocalories per mole). Given the extreme diversity of molecular systems covered by the model, this simple EBR/SA estimator covers a vast applicability domain.
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Affiliation(s)
- Dragos Horvath
- Laboratory of Chemoinformatics, UMR 7140 University of Strasbourg/CNRS, 4 rue Blaise Pascal, 67000 Strasbourg, France
| | - Gilles Marcou
- Laboratory of Chemoinformatics, UMR 7140 University of Strasbourg/CNRS, 4 rue Blaise Pascal, 67000 Strasbourg, France
| | - Alexandre Varnek
- Laboratory of Chemoinformatics, UMR 7140 University of Strasbourg/CNRS, 4 rue Blaise Pascal, 67000 Strasbourg, France
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Brieg M, Setzler J, Albert S, Wenzel W. Generalized Born implicit solvent models for small molecule hydration free energies. Phys Chem Chem Phys 2018; 19:1677-1685. [PMID: 27995260 DOI: 10.1039/c6cp07347f] [Citation(s) in RCA: 11] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/09/2023]
Abstract
Hydration free energy estimation of small molecules from all-atom simulations was widely investigated in recent years, as it provides an essential test of molecular force fields and our understanding of solvation effects. While explicit solvent representations result in highly accurate models, they also require extensive sampling due to the high number of solvent degrees of freedom. Implicit solvent models, such as those based on the generalized Born model for electrostatic solvation effects and a solvent accessible surface area term for nonpolar contributions (GBSA), significantly reduce the number of degrees of freedom and the computational cost to estimate hydration free energies. However, a recent survey revealed a gap in the accuracy between explicit TIP3P solvent estimates and those computed with many common GBSA models. Here we address this shortcoming by providing a thorough comparison of the performance of three implicit solvent models with different nonpolar contributions and a generalized Born term to estimate experimental hydration free energies. Starting with a minimal set of only ten atom types, we demonstrate that a nonpolar term with atom type dependent surface tension coefficients in combination with an accurate generalized Born term and fully optimized parameters performs best in estimating hydration free energies, even yielding comparable results to the explicit TIP3P water model. Analysis of our results provides evidence that the asymmetric behavior of water around oppositely charged atoms is one of the main sources of error for two of the three implicit solvent models. Explicitly accounting for this effect in the parameterization reduces the corresponding errors, suggesting this as a general strategy for improving implicit solvent models. The findings presented here will help to improve the existing generalized Born based implicit solvent models implemented in state-of-the-art molecular simulation packages.
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Affiliation(s)
- Martin Brieg
- Steinbuch Centre for Computing (SCC), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), P.O. Box 3640, 76021 Karlsruhe, Germany and Institute of Nanotechnology (INT), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), P.O. Box 3640, 76021 Karlsruhe, Germany.
| | - Julia Setzler
- Institute of Nanotechnology (INT), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), P.O. Box 3640, 76021 Karlsruhe, Germany.
| | - Steffen Albert
- Institute of Nanotechnology (INT), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), P.O. Box 3640, 76021 Karlsruhe, Germany.
| | - Wolfgang Wenzel
- Institute of Nanotechnology (INT), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), P.O. Box 3640, 76021 Karlsruhe, Germany.
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Ozboyaci M, Martinez M, Wade RC. An Efficient Low Storage and Memory Treatment of Gridded Interaction Fields for Simulations of Macromolecular Association. J Chem Theory Comput 2016; 12:4563-77. [DOI: 10.1021/acs.jctc.6b00350] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Musa Ozboyaci
- Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS), Schloss-Wolfsbrunnenweg 35, 69118 Heidelberg, Germany
- Heidelberg Graduate School of Mathematical and Computational Methods for the Sciences, Heidelberg University, INF 205, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany
| | - Michael Martinez
- Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS), Schloss-Wolfsbrunnenweg 35, 69118 Heidelberg, Germany
| | - Rebecca C. Wade
- Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS), Schloss-Wolfsbrunnenweg 35, 69118 Heidelberg, Germany
- Zentrum für Molekulare Biologie der Universität Heidelberg, DKFZ-ZMBH Allianz, INF 282, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany
- Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing, Heidelberg University, INF 205, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany
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Zachmann M, Mathias G, Antes I. Parameterization of the Hamiltonian Dielectric Solvent (HADES) Reaction-Field Method for the Solvation Free Energies of Amino Acid Side-Chain Analogs. Chemphyschem 2015; 16:1739-49. [PMID: 25820235 DOI: 10.1002/cphc.201402861] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/04/2014] [Revised: 02/02/2015] [Indexed: 11/10/2022]
Abstract
Optimization of the Hamiltonian dielectric solvent (HADES) method for biomolecular simulations in a dielectric continuum is presented with the goal of calculating accurate absolute solvation free energies while retaining the model's accuracy in predicting conformational free-energy differences. The solvation free energies of neutral and polar amino acid side-chain analogs calculated by using HADES, which may optionally include nonpolar contributions, were optimized against experimental data to reach a chemical accuracy of about 0.5 kcal mol(-1). The new parameters were evaluated for charged side-chain analogs. The HADES results were compared with explicit-solvent, generalized Born, Poisson-Boltzmann, and QM-based methods. The potentials of mean force (PMFs) between pairs of side-chain analogs obtained by using HADES and explicit-solvent simulations were used to evaluate the effects of the improved parameters optimized for solvation free energies on intermolecular potentials.
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Affiliation(s)
- Martin Zachmann
- Theoretical Chemical Biology and Protein Modelling Group, Technische Universiät München (Germany)
| | - Gerald Mathias
- Lehrstuhl für Biomolekulare Optik, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München (Germany).
| | - Iris Antes
- Theoretical Chemical Biology and Protein Modelling Group, Technische Universiät München (Germany).
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Setzler J, Seith C, Brieg M, Wenzel W. SLIM: an improved generalized Born implicit membrane model. J Comput Chem 2015; 35:2027-39. [PMID: 25243932 DOI: 10.1002/jcc.23717] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/07/2013] [Revised: 07/02/2014] [Accepted: 07/28/2014] [Indexed: 12/24/2022]
Abstract
In most implicit continuum models, membranes are represented as heterogeneous dielectric environments, but their treatment within computationally efficient generalized Born (GB) models is challenging. Despite several previous attempts, an adequate description of multiple dielectric regions in implicit GB-based membrane models that reproduce the qualitative and quantitative features of Poisson-Boltzmann (PB) electrostatics remains an unmet prerequisite of qualitatively correct implicit membrane models. A novel scheme (SLIM) to decompose one environment consisting of multiple dielectric regions into a sum of multiple environments consisting only of two dielectric regions each is proposed to solve this issue. These simpler environments can be treated with established GB methods. This approach captures qualitative features of PB electrostatic that are not present in previous models. Simulations of three membrane proteins demonstrate that this model correctly reproduces known properties of these proteins in agreement with experimental or other computational studies.
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Affiliation(s)
- Julia Setzler
- Institute of Nanotechnology (INT), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), P.O. Box 3640, 76021, Karlsruhe, Germany
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Carballo-Pacheco M, Vancea I, Strodel B. Extension of the FACTS Implicit Solvation Model to Membranes. J Chem Theory Comput 2014; 10:3163-76. [DOI: 10.1021/ct500084y] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 02/03/2023]
Affiliation(s)
- Martín Carballo-Pacheco
- Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Institute of Complex
Systems: Structural Biochemistry (ICS-6), 52425 Jülich, Germany
| | - Ioan Vancea
- Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Institute of Complex
Systems: Structural Biochemistry (ICS-6), 52425 Jülich, Germany
| | - Birgit Strodel
- Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Institute of Complex
Systems: Structural Biochemistry (ICS-6), 52425 Jülich, Germany
- Institute
of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Universitätstrasse 1, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany
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