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Sanbonmatsu K. Supercomputing in the biological sciences: Toward Zettascale and Yottascale simulations. Curr Opin Struct Biol 2024; 88:102889. [PMID: 39163795 DOI: 10.1016/j.sbi.2024.102889] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/04/2024] [Revised: 07/03/2024] [Accepted: 07/03/2024] [Indexed: 08/22/2024]
Abstract
Molecular simulations of biological systems tend to be significantly more compute-intensive than those in materials science and astrophysics, due to important contributions of long-range electrostatic forces and large numbers of time steps (>1E9) required. Simulations of biomolecular complexes of microseconds to milliseconds are considered state-of-the-art today. However, these time scales are miniscule in comparison to physiological time scales relevant to molecular machine activity, drug action, and elongation cycles for protein synthesis, RNA synthesis, and DNA synthesis (seconds to days). While an exascale supercomputer has simulated an entire virus for nanoseconds, this supercomputer would need to be 10 billion times faster to simulate that virus for 3 hours of physiological time, demonstrating the insatiable need for computing power. With growing interest in computational drug design from the pharmaceutical sector, the biological sciences are positioned to be an industry driver in computing.
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2
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Alejo JL, Girodat D, Hammerling MJ, Willi JA, Jewett MC, Engelhart AE, Adamala KP. Alternate conformational trajectories in ribosome translocation. PLoS Comput Biol 2024; 20:e1012319. [PMID: 39141679 PMCID: PMC11346969 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012319] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/20/2024] [Revised: 08/26/2024] [Accepted: 07/12/2024] [Indexed: 08/16/2024] Open
Abstract
Translocation in protein synthesis entails the efficient and accurate movement of the mRNA-[tRNA]2 substrate through the ribosome after peptide bond formation. An essential conformational change during this process is the swiveling of the small subunit head domain about two rRNA 'hinge' elements. Using iterative selection and molecular dynamics simulations, we derive alternate hinge elements capable of translocation in vitro and in vivo and describe their effects on the conformational trajectory of the EF-G-bound, translocating ribosome. In these alternate conformational pathways, we observe a diversity of swivel kinetics, hinge motions, three-dimensional head domain trajectories and tRNA dynamics. By finding alternate conformational pathways of translocation, we identify motions and intermediates that are essential or malleable in this process. These findings highlight the plasticity of protein synthesis and provide a more thorough understanding of the available sequence and conformational landscape of a central biological process.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jose L. Alejo
- Department of Genetics, Cell Biology and Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States of America
| | - Dylan Girodat
- Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas, United States of America
| | - Michael J. Hammerling
- Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, United States of America
| | - Jessica A. Willi
- Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, United States of America
| | - Michael C. Jewett
- Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, United States of America
- Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America
| | - Aaron E. Engelhart
- Department of Genetics, Cell Biology and Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States of America
| | - Katarzyna P. Adamala
- Department of Genetics, Cell Biology and Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States of America
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3
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Bock LV, Igaev M, Grubmüller H. Single-particle Cryo-EM and molecular dynamics simulations: A perfect match. Curr Opin Struct Biol 2024; 86:102825. [PMID: 38723560 DOI: 10.1016/j.sbi.2024.102825] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/08/2024] [Revised: 04/08/2024] [Accepted: 04/09/2024] [Indexed: 05/19/2024]
Abstract
Knowledge of the structure and dynamics of biomolecules is key to understanding the mechanisms underlying their biological functions. Single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is a powerful structural biology technique to characterize complex biomolecular systems. Here, we review recent advances of how Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations are being used to increase and enhance the information extracted from cryo-EM experiments. We will particularly focus on the physics underlying these experiments, how MD facilitates structure refinement, in particular for heterogeneous and non-isotropic resolution, and how thermodynamic and kinetic information can be extracted from cryo-EM data.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lars V Bock
- Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Department, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Am Fassberg 11, Göttingen, 37077, Germany. https://twitter.com/Pogoscience
| | - Maxim Igaev
- Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Department, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Am Fassberg 11, Göttingen, 37077, Germany. https://twitter.com/maxotubule
| | - Helmut Grubmüller
- Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Department, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Am Fassberg 11, Göttingen, 37077, Germany.
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4
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Chowdhury AR, Sapkota D, Girodat D. Conformational changes of ribosomes during translation elongation resolved by molecular dynamics simulations. Curr Opin Struct Biol 2024; 86:102804. [PMID: 38569462 DOI: 10.1016/j.sbi.2024.102804] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/02/2023] [Revised: 02/06/2024] [Accepted: 03/04/2024] [Indexed: 04/05/2024]
Abstract
Molecular dynamics simulations have emerged as a powerful set of tools to unravel the intricate dynamics of ribosomes during protein synthesis. Recent advancements in this field have enabled simulations to delve deep into the conformational rearrangements of ribosomes and associated factors, providing invaluable insights into the intricacies of translation. Emphasis on simulations has recently been on translation elongation, such as tRNA selection, translocation, and ribosomal head-swivel motions. These studies have offered crucial structural interpretations of how genetic information is faithfully translated into proteins. This review outlines recent discoveries concerning ribosome conformational changes occurring during translation elongation, as elucidated through molecular dynamics simulations.
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Affiliation(s)
- Anuradha Rai Chowdhury
- Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, 72701, USA. https://twitter.com/atomcellplankl
| | - Divya Sapkota
- Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, 72701, USA; Cell and Molecular Biology Program, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, 72701, USA
| | - Dylan Girodat
- Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, 72701, USA.
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5
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Belghit H, Spivak M, Dauchez M, Baaden M, Jonquet-Prevoteau J. From complex data to clear insights: visualizing molecular dynamics trajectories. FRONTIERS IN BIOINFORMATICS 2024; 4:1356659. [PMID: 38665177 PMCID: PMC11043564 DOI: 10.3389/fbinf.2024.1356659] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/15/2023] [Accepted: 03/14/2024] [Indexed: 04/28/2024] Open
Abstract
Advances in simulations, combined with technological developments in high-performance computing, have made it possible to produce a physically accurate dynamic representation of complex biological systems involving millions to billions of atoms over increasingly long simulation times. The analysis of these computed simulations is crucial, involving the interpretation of structural and dynamic data to gain insights into the underlying biological processes. However, this analysis becomes increasingly challenging due to the complexity of the generated systems with a large number of individual runs, ranging from hundreds to thousands of trajectories. This massive increase in raw simulation data creates additional processing and visualization challenges. Effective visualization techniques play a vital role in facilitating the analysis and interpretation of molecular dynamics simulations. In this paper, we focus mainly on the techniques and tools that can be used for visualization of molecular dynamics simulations, among which we highlight the few approaches used specifically for this purpose, discussing their advantages and limitations, and addressing the future challenges of molecular dynamics visualization.
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Affiliation(s)
- Hayet Belghit
- Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, CNRS, MEDYC, Reims, France
| | - Mariano Spivak
- Université Paris Cité, CNRS, Laboratoire de Biochimie Théorique, Paris, France
| | - Manuel Dauchez
- Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, CNRS, MEDYC, Reims, France
| | - Marc Baaden
- Université Paris Cité, CNRS, Laboratoire de Biochimie Théorique, Paris, France
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6
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Beck TL, Carloni P, Asthagiri DN. All-Atom Biomolecular Simulation in the Exascale Era. J Chem Theory Comput 2024; 20:1777-1782. [PMID: 38382017 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jctc.3c01276] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 02/23/2024]
Abstract
Exascale supercomputers have opened the door to dynamic simulations, facilitated by AI/ML techniques, that model biomolecular motions over unprecedented length and time scales. This new capability holds the potential to revolutionize our understanding of fundamental biological processes. Here we report on some of the major advances that were discussed at a recent CECAM workshop in Pisa, Italy, on the topic with a primary focus on atomic-level simulations. First, we highlight examples of current large-scale biomolecular simulations and the future possibilities enabled by crossing the exascale threshold. Next, we discuss challenges to be overcome in optimizing the usage of these powerful resources. Finally, we close by listing several grand challenge problems that could be investigated with this new computer architecture.
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Affiliation(s)
- Thomas L Beck
- National Center for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37830, United States
| | - Paolo Carloni
- INM-9/IAS-5 Computational Biomedicine, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Wilhelm-Johnen-Straße, D-54245 Jülich, Germany
- Department of Physics, RWTH Aachen University, D-52078 Aachen, Germany
| | - Dilipkumar N Asthagiri
- National Center for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37830, United States
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7
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Byju S, Hassan A, Whitford PC. The energy landscape of the ribosome. Biopolymers 2024; 115:e23570. [PMID: 38051695 DOI: 10.1002/bip.23570] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/27/2023] [Revised: 10/17/2023] [Accepted: 11/08/2023] [Indexed: 12/07/2023]
Abstract
The ribosome is a prototypical assembly that can be used to establish general principles and techniques for the study of biological molecular machines. Motivated by the fact that the dynamics of every biomolecule is governed by an underlying energy landscape, there has been great interest to understand and quantify ribosome energetics. In the present review, we will focus on theoretical and computational strategies for probing the interactions that shape the energy landscape of the ribosome, with an emphasis on more recent studies of the elongation cycle. These efforts include the application of quantum mechanical methods for describing chemical kinetics, as well as classical descriptions to characterize slower (microsecond to millisecond) large-scale (10-100 Å) rearrangements, where motion is described in terms of diffusion across an energy landscape. Together, these studies provide broad insights into the factors that control a diverse range of dynamical processes in this assembly.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sandra Byju
- Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
- Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
| | - Asem Hassan
- Department of Chemistry, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, United States
| | - Paul C Whitford
- Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
- Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
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8
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Ormazábal A, Palma J, Pierdominici-Sottile G. Dynamics and Function of sRNA/mRNAs Under the Scrutiny of Computational Simulation Methods. Methods Mol Biol 2024; 2741:207-238. [PMID: 38217656 DOI: 10.1007/978-1-0716-3565-0_12] [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] [Indexed: 01/15/2024]
Abstract
Molecular dynamics simulations have proved extremely useful in investigating the functioning of proteins with atomic-scale resolution. Many applications to the study of RNA also exist, and their number increases by the day. However, implementing MD simulations for RNA molecules in solution faces challenges that the MD practitioner must be aware of for the appropriate use of this tool. In this chapter, we present the fundamentals of MD simulations, in general, and the peculiarities of RNA simulations, in particular. We discuss the strengths and limitations of the technique and provide examples of its application to elucidate small RNA's performance.
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Affiliation(s)
- Agustín Ormazábal
- Departmento de Ciencia y Tecnología, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Bernal, Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, CONICET, Godoy Cruz, CABA, Argentina
| | - Juliana Palma
- Departmento de Ciencia y Tecnología, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Bernal, Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, CONICET, Godoy Cruz, CABA, Argentina
| | - Gustavo Pierdominici-Sottile
- Departmento de Ciencia y Tecnología, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Bernal, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
- Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, CONICET, Godoy Cruz, CABA, Argentina.
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9
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Poulis P, Peske F, Rodnina MV. The many faces of ribosome translocation along the mRNA: reading frame maintenance, ribosome frameshifting and translational bypassing. Biol Chem 2023; 404:755-767. [PMID: 37077160 DOI: 10.1515/hsz-2023-0142] [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: 02/21/2023] [Accepted: 03/22/2023] [Indexed: 04/21/2023]
Abstract
In each round of translation elongation, the ribosome translocates along the mRNA by precisely one codon. Translocation is promoted by elongation factor G (EF-G) in bacteria (eEF2 in eukaryotes) and entails a number of precisely-timed large-scale structural rearrangements. As a rule, the movements of the ribosome, tRNAs, mRNA and EF-G are orchestrated to maintain the exact codon-wise step size. However, signals in the mRNA, as well as environmental cues, can change the timing and dynamics of the key rearrangements leading to recoding of the mRNA into production of trans-frame peptides from the same mRNA. In this review, we discuss recent advances on the mechanics of translocation and reading frame maintenance. Furthermore, we describe the mechanisms and biological relevance of non-canonical translocation pathways, such as hungry and programmed frameshifting and translational bypassing, and their link to disease and infection.
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Affiliation(s)
- Panagiotis Poulis
- Department of Physical Biochemistry, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Am Fassberg 11, D-37077 Göttingen, Germany
| | - Frank Peske
- Department of Physical Biochemistry, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Am Fassberg 11, D-37077 Göttingen, Germany
| | - Marina V Rodnina
- Department of Physical Biochemistry, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Am Fassberg 11, D-37077 Göttingen, Germany
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10
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Blau C, Yvonnesdotter L, Lindahl E. Gentle and fast all-atom model refinement to cryo-EM densities via a maximum likelihood approach. PLoS Comput Biol 2023; 19:e1011255. [PMID: 37523411 PMCID: PMC10427019 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011255] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/30/2022] [Revised: 08/15/2023] [Accepted: 06/09/2023] [Indexed: 08/02/2023] Open
Abstract
Better detectors and automated data collection have generated a flood of high-resolution cryo-EM maps, which in turn has renewed interest in improving methods for determining structure models corresponding to these maps. However, automatically fitting atoms to densities becomes difficult as their resolution increases and the refinement potential has a vast number of local minima. In practice, the problem becomes even more complex when one also wants to achieve a balance between a good fit of atom positions to the map, while also establishing good stereochemistry or allowing protein secondary structure to change during fitting. Here, we present a solution to this challenge using a maximum likelihood approach by formulating the problem as identifying the structure most likely to have produced the observed density map. This allows us to derive new types of smooth refinement potential-based on relative entropy-in combination with a novel adaptive force scaling algorithm to allow balancing of force-field and density-based potentials. In a low-noise scenario, as expected from modern cryo-EM data, the relative-entropy based refinement potential outperforms alternatives, and the adaptive force scaling appears to aid all existing refinement potentials. The method is available as a component in the GROMACS molecular simulation toolkit.
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Affiliation(s)
- Christian Blau
- Department of Applied Physics, Science for Life Laboratory, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
| | - Linnea Yvonnesdotter
- Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Science for Life Laboratory, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
| | - Erik Lindahl
- Department of Applied Physics, Science for Life Laboratory, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
- Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Science for Life Laboratory, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
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11
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Sinha S, Pindi C, Ahsan M, Arantes PR, Palermo G. Machines on Genes through the Computational Microscope. J Chem Theory Comput 2023; 19:1945-1964. [PMID: 36947696 PMCID: PMC10104023 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jctc.2c01313] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 03/24/2023]
Abstract
Macromolecular machines acting on genes are at the core of life's fundamental processes, including DNA replication and repair, gene transcription and regulation, chromatin packaging, RNA splicing, and genome editing. Here, we report the increasing role of computational biophysics in characterizing the mechanisms of "machines on genes", focusing on innovative applications of computational methods and their integration with structural and biophysical experiments. We showcase how state-of-the-art computational methods, including classical and ab initio molecular dynamics to enhanced sampling techniques, and coarse-grained approaches are used for understanding and exploring gene machines for real-world applications. As this review unfolds, advanced computational methods describe the biophysical function that is unseen through experimental techniques, accomplishing the power of the "computational microscope", an expression coined by Klaus Schulten to highlight the extraordinary capability of computer simulations. Pushing the frontiers of computational biophysics toward a pragmatic representation of large multimegadalton biomolecular complexes is instrumental in bridging the gap between experimentally obtained macroscopic observables and the molecular principles playing at the microscopic level. This understanding will help harness molecular machines for medical, pharmaceutical, and biotechnological purposes.
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12
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Wang Y, Zhang Z, Liu X, Chen N, Zhao Y, Wang C. Molecular dynamic simulations identifying the mechanism of holoenzyme formation by O-GlcNAc transferase and active p38α. Phys Chem Chem Phys 2023; 25:8090-8102. [PMID: 36876722 DOI: 10.1039/d2cp05968a] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 02/19/2023]
Abstract
O-N-Acetylglucosamine transferase (OGT) can catalyze the O-GlcNAc modification of thousands of proteins. The holoenzyme formation of OGT and adaptor protein is the precondition for further recognition and glycosylation of the target protein, while the corresponding mechanism is still open. Here, static and dynamic schemes based on statistics can successfully screen the feasible identifying, approaching, and binding mechanism of OGT and its typical adaptor protein p38α. The most favorable interface, energy contribution of hotspots, and conformational changes of fragments were discovered. The hydrogen bond interactions were verified as the main driving force for the whole process. The distinct characteristic of active and inactive p38α is explored and demonstrates that the phosphorylated tyrosine and threonine will form strong ion-pair interactions with Lys714, playing a key role in the dynamic identification stage. Multiple method combinations from different points of view may be helpful for exploring other systems of the protein-protein interactions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yu Wang
- The Key Laboratory of Natural Medicine and Immuno-Engineering, Henan University, Kaifeng, 475004, China.
| | - Zhiyang Zhang
- The Key Laboratory of Natural Medicine and Immuno-Engineering, Henan University, Kaifeng, 475004, China.
| | - Xiaoyuan Liu
- The Key Laboratory of Natural Medicine and Immuno-Engineering, Henan University, Kaifeng, 475004, China.
| | - Nianhang Chen
- School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510006, China
| | - Yuan Zhao
- The Key Laboratory of Natural Medicine and Immuno-Engineering, Henan University, Kaifeng, 475004, China.
| | - Chaojie Wang
- The Key Laboratory of Natural Medicine and Immuno-Engineering, Henan University, Kaifeng, 475004, China.
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13
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Hassan A, Byju S, Freitas F, Roc C, Pender N, Nguyen K, Kimbrough E, Mattingly J, Gonzalez Jr. R, de Oliveira R, Dunham C, Whitford P. Ratchet, swivel, tilt and roll: a complete description of subunit rotation in the ribosome. Nucleic Acids Res 2022; 51:919-934. [PMID: 36583339 PMCID: PMC9881166 DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkac1211] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/23/2022] [Revised: 12/01/2022] [Accepted: 12/06/2022] [Indexed: 12/31/2022] Open
Abstract
Protein synthesis by the ribosome requires large-scale rearrangements of the 'small' subunit (SSU; ∼1 MDa), including inter- and intra-subunit rotational motions. However, with nearly 2000 structures of ribosomes and ribosomal subunits now publicly available, it is exceedingly difficult to design experiments based on analysis of all known rotation states. To overcome this, we developed an approach where the orientation of each SSU head and body is described in terms of three angular coordinates (rotation, tilt and tilt direction) and a single translation. By considering the entire RCSB PDB database, we describe 1208 fully-assembled ribosome complexes and 334 isolated small subunits, which span >50 species. This reveals aspects of subunit rearrangements that are universal, and others that are organism/domain-specific. For example, we show that tilt-like rearrangements of the SSU body (i.e. 'rolling') are pervasive in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic (cytosolic and mitochondrial) ribosomes. As another example, domain orientations associated with frameshifting in bacteria are similar to those found in eukaryotic ribosomes. Together, this study establishes a common foundation with which structural, simulation, single-molecule and biochemical efforts can more precisely interrogate the dynamics of this prototypical molecular machine.
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Affiliation(s)
| | | | | | - Claude Roc
- Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Dana Research Center 111, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115, USA
| | - Nisaa Pender
- Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Dana Research Center 111, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115, USA
| | - Kien Nguyen
- Theoretical Biology and Biophysics, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
| | - Evelyn M Kimbrough
- Department of Biochemistry, Emory University, Rollins Research Center 4027, 1510 Clifton Rd NE, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA,Department of Chemistry, Emory University, 1515 Dickey Dr, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA
| | - Jacob M Mattingly
- Department of Biochemistry, Emory University, Rollins Research Center 4027, 1510 Clifton Rd NE, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA
| | | | - Ronaldo Junio de Oliveira
- Laboratório de Biofísica Teórica, Departamento de Física, Instituto de Ciências Exatas, Naturais e Educação, Universidade Federal do Triângulo Mineiro, Uberaba, MG 38064-200, Brazil
| | - Christine M Dunham
- Department of Biochemistry, Emory University, Rollins Research Center 4027, 1510 Clifton Rd NE, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA
| | - Paul C Whitford
- To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +1 617 373 2952;
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14
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Altered tRNA dynamics during translocation on slippery mRNA as determinant of spontaneous ribosome frameshifting. Nat Commun 2022; 13:4231. [PMID: 35869111 PMCID: PMC9307594 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-31852-w] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/17/2022] [Accepted: 07/06/2022] [Indexed: 11/08/2022] Open
Abstract
AbstractWhen reading consecutive mRNA codons, ribosomes move by exactly one triplet at a time to synthesize a correct protein. Some mRNA tracks, called slippery sequences, are prone to ribosomal frameshifting, because the same tRNA can read both 0- and –1-frame codon. Using smFRET we show that during EF-G-catalyzed translocation on slippery sequences a fraction of ribosomes spontaneously switches from rapid, accurate translation to a slow, frameshifting-prone translocation mode where the movements of peptidyl- and deacylated tRNA become uncoupled. While deacylated tRNA translocates rapidly, pept-tRNA continues to fluctuate between chimeric and posttranslocation states, which slows down the re-locking of the small ribosomal subunit head domain. After rapid release of deacylated tRNA, pept-tRNA gains unconstrained access to the –1-frame triplet, resulting in slippage followed by recruitment of the –1-frame aa-tRNA into the A site. Our data show how altered choreography of tRNA and ribosome movements reduces the translation fidelity of ribosomes translocating in a slow mode.
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15
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Unravelling viral dynamics through molecular dynamics simulations - A brief overview. Biophys Chem 2022; 291:106908. [DOI: 10.1016/j.bpc.2022.106908] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/18/2022] [Revised: 09/28/2022] [Accepted: 10/05/2022] [Indexed: 11/24/2022]
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16
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Delhommel F, Martínez-Lumbreras S, Sattler M. Combining NMR, SAXS and SANS to characterize the structure and dynamics of protein complexes. Methods Enzymol 2022; 678:263-297. [PMID: 36641211 DOI: 10.1016/bs.mie.2022.09.020] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/05/2022]
Abstract
Understanding the structure and dynamics of biological macromolecules is essential to decipher the molecular mechanisms that underlie cellular functions. The description of structure and conformational dynamics often requires the integration of complementary techniques. In this review, we highlight the utility of combining nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy with small angle scattering (SAS) to characterize these challenging biomolecular systems. NMR can assess the structure and conformational dynamics of multidomain proteins, RNAs and biomolecular complexes. It can efficiently provide information on interaction surfaces, long-distance restraints and relative domain orientations at residue-level resolution. Such information can be readily combined with high-resolution structural data available on subcomponents of biomolecular assemblies. Moreover, NMR is a powerful tool to characterize the dynamics of biomolecules on a wide range of timescales, from nanoseconds to seconds. On the other hand, SAS approaches provide global information on the size and shape of biomolecules and on the ensemble of all conformations present in solution. Therefore, NMR and SAS provide complementary data that are uniquely suited to investigate dynamic biomolecular assemblies. Here, we briefly review the type of data that can be obtained by both techniques and describe different approaches that can be used to combine them to characterize biomolecular assemblies. We then provide guidelines on which experiments are best suited depending on the type of system studied, ranging from fully rigid complexes, dynamic structures that interconvert between defined conformations and systems with very high structural heterogeneity.
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Affiliation(s)
- Florent Delhommel
- Institute of Structural Biology, Helmholtz Zentrum München, Neuherberg, Germany; Bavarian NMR Center, Department of Chemistry, Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany
| | - Santiago Martínez-Lumbreras
- Institute of Structural Biology, Helmholtz Zentrum München, Neuherberg, Germany; Bavarian NMR Center, Department of Chemistry, Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany
| | - Michael Sattler
- Institute of Structural Biology, Helmholtz Zentrum München, Neuherberg, Germany; Bavarian NMR Center, Department of Chemistry, Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany.
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17
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Hassan A, Whitford PC. Identifying Strategies to Experimentally Probe Multidimensional Dynamics in the Ribosome. J Phys Chem B 2022; 126:8460-8471. [PMID: 36256879 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcb.2c05706] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/11/2023]
Abstract
The ribosome is a complex biomolecular machine that utilizes large-scale conformational rearrangements to synthesize proteins. For example, during the elongation cycle, the "head" domain of the ribosomal small subunit (SSU) is known to undergo transient rotation events that allow for movement of tRNA molecules (i.e., translocation). While the head may exhibit rigid-body-like properties, the precise relationship between experimentally accessible probes and multidimensional rotations has yet to be established. To address this gap, we perform molecular dynamics simulations of the translocation step of the elongation cycle in the ribosome, where the SSU head spontaneously undergoes rotation and tilt-like motions. With this data set (1250 simulated events), we used statistical and information-theory-based measures to identify possible single-molecule probes that can isolate SSU head rotation and head tilting. This analysis provides a molecular interpretation for previous single-molecule measurements, while establishing a framework for the design of next-generation experiments that may precisely probe the mechanistic and kinetic aspects of the ribosome.
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Affiliation(s)
- Asem Hassan
- Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Dana Research Center 111, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts02115, United States.,Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts02115, United States
| | - Paul C Whitford
- Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Dana Research Center 111, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts02115, United States.,Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts02115, United States
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18
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Xue L, Lenz S, Zimmermann-Kogadeeva M, Tegunov D, Cramer P, Bork P, Rappsilber J, Mahamid J. Visualizing translation dynamics at atomic detail inside a bacterial cell. Nature 2022; 610:205-211. [PMID: 36171285 PMCID: PMC9534751 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05255-2] [Citation(s) in RCA: 53] [Impact Index Per Article: 26.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/18/2021] [Accepted: 08/19/2022] [Indexed: 12/03/2022]
Abstract
Translation is the fundamental process of protein synthesis and is catalysed by the ribosome in all living cells1. Here we use advances in cryo-electron tomography and sub-tomogram analysis2,3 to visualize the structural dynamics of translation inside the bacterium Mycoplasma pneumoniae. To interpret the functional states in detail, we first obtain a high-resolution in-cell average map of all translating ribosomes and build an atomic model for the M. pneumoniae ribosome that reveals distinct extensions of ribosomal proteins. Classification then resolves 13 ribosome states that differ in their conformation and composition. These recapitulate major states that were previously resolved in vitro, and reflect intermediates during active translation. On the basis of these states, we animate translation elongation inside native cells and show how antibiotics reshape the cellular translation landscapes. During translation elongation, ribosomes often assemble in defined three-dimensional arrangements to form polysomes4. By mapping the intracellular organization of translating ribosomes, we show that their association into polysomes involves a local coordination mechanism that is mediated by the ribosomal protein L9. We propose that an extended conformation of L9 within polysomes mitigates collisions to facilitate translation fidelity. Our work thus demonstrates the feasibility of visualizing molecular processes at atomic detail inside cells.
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Affiliation(s)
- Liang Xue
- Structural and Computational Biology Unit, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg, Germany
- Collaboration for joint PhD degree between EMBL and Heidelberg University, Faculty of Biosciences, Heidelberg, Germany
| | - Swantje Lenz
- Chair of Bioanalytics, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
| | - Maria Zimmermann-Kogadeeva
- Structural and Computational Biology Unit, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg, Germany
| | - Dimitry Tegunov
- Department of Molecular Biology, Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany
| | - Patrick Cramer
- Department of Molecular Biology, Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany
| | - Peer Bork
- Structural and Computational Biology Unit, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg, Germany
- Yonsei Frontier Lab, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea
- Department of Bioinformatics, Biocenter, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
| | - Juri Rappsilber
- Chair of Bioanalytics, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
- Wellcome Centre for Cell Biology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
| | - Julia Mahamid
- Structural and Computational Biology Unit, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg, Germany.
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19
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Nishima W, Girodat D, Holm M, Rundlet EJ, Alejo JL, Fischer K, Blanchard SC, Sanbonmatsu KY. Hyper-swivel head domain motions are required for complete mRNA-tRNA translocation and ribosome resetting. Nucleic Acids Res 2022; 50:8302-8320. [PMID: 35808938 DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkac597] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/12/2021] [Revised: 06/15/2022] [Accepted: 07/05/2022] [Indexed: 11/14/2022] Open
Abstract
Translocation of messenger RNA (mRNA) and transfer RNA (tRNA) substrates through the ribosome during protein synthesis, an exemplar of directional molecular movement in biology, entails a complex interplay of conformational, compositional, and chemical changes. The molecular determinants of early translocation steps have been investigated rigorously. However, the elements enabling the ribosome to complete translocation and reset for subsequent protein synthesis reactions remain poorly understood. Here, we have combined molecular simulations with single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer imaging to gain insights into the rate-limiting events of the translocation mechanism. We find that diffusive motions of the ribosomal small subunit head domain to hyper-swivelled positions, governed by universally conserved rRNA, can maneuver the mRNA and tRNAs to their fully translocated positions. Subsequent engagement of peptidyl-tRNA and disengagement of deacyl-tRNA from mRNA, within their respective small subunit binding sites, facilitate the ribosome resetting mechanism after translocation has occurred to enable protein synthesis to resume.
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Affiliation(s)
- Wataru Nishima
- Theoretical Biology and Biophysics, Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
- New Mexico Consortium, Los Alamos, NM 87544, USA
| | - Dylan Girodat
- Theoretical Biology and Biophysics, Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
- New Mexico Consortium, Los Alamos, NM 87544, USA
| | - Mikael Holm
- Department of Structural Biology, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, TN 38105, USA
| | - Emily J Rundlet
- Department of Structural Biology, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, TN 38105, USA
- Tri-Institutional PhD Program in Chemical Biology, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY 10021, USA
| | - Jose L Alejo
- Department of Genetics, Cell Biology and Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
| | - Kara Fischer
- New Mexico Consortium, Los Alamos, NM 87544, USA
| | - Scott C Blanchard
- Department of Structural Biology, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, TN 38105, USA
| | - Karissa Y Sanbonmatsu
- Theoretical Biology and Biophysics, Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
- New Mexico Consortium, Los Alamos, NM 87544, USA
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20
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Basu I, Gorai B, Chandran T, Maiti PK, Hussain T. Selection of start codon during mRNA scanning in eukaryotic translation initiation. Commun Biol 2022; 5:587. [PMID: 35705698 PMCID: PMC9200866 DOI: 10.1038/s42003-022-03534-2] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/15/2021] [Accepted: 05/25/2022] [Indexed: 11/24/2022] Open
Abstract
Accurate and high-speed scanning and subsequent selection of the correct start codon are important events in protein synthesis. Eukaryotic mRNAs have long 5′ UTRs that are inspected for the presence of a start codon by the ribosomal 48S pre-initiation complex (PIC). However, the conformational state of the 48S PIC required for inspecting every codon is not clearly understood. Here, atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and energy calculations suggest that the scanning conformation of 48S PIC may reject all but 4 (GUG, CUG, UUG and ACG) of the 63 non-AUG codons, and initiation factor eIF1 is crucial for this discrimination. We provide insights into the possible role of initiation factors eIF1, eIF1A, eIF2α and eIF2β in scanning. Overall, the study highlights how the scanning conformation of ribosomal 48S PIC acts as a coarse selectivity checkpoint for start codon selection and scans long 5′ UTRs in eukaryotic mRNAs with accuracy and high speed. Molecular simulations of start codon selection by the eukaryotic ribosome during mRNA scanning provide further insight into high speed of scanning and how initiation factors contribute toward codon-anticodon-ribosome network stability.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ipsita Basu
- Center for Condensed Matter Theory, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, 560012, India
| | - Biswajit Gorai
- Center for Condensed Matter Theory, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, 560012, India.,Department of Chemical Engineering, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH-03824, USA
| | - Thyageshwar Chandran
- Department of Molecular Reproduction, Development and Genetics, Division of Biological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, 560012, India.,Department of Biotechnology, National Institute of Technology-Warangal, Telangana, 506004, India
| | - Prabal K Maiti
- Center for Condensed Matter Theory, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, 560012, India.
| | - Tanweer Hussain
- Department of Molecular Reproduction, Development and Genetics, Division of Biological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, 560012, India.
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21
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Wang A, Levi M, Mohanty U, Whitford PC. Diffuse Ions Coordinate Dynamics in a Ribonucleoprotein Assembly. J Am Chem Soc 2022; 144:9510-9522. [PMID: 35593477 DOI: 10.1021/jacs.2c04082] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/31/2022]
Abstract
Proper ionic concentrations are required for the functional dynamics of RNA and ribonucleoprotein (RNP) assemblies. While experimental and computational techniques have provided many insights into the properties of chelated ions, less is known about the energetic contributions of diffuse ions to large-scale conformational rearrangements. To address this, we present a model that is designed to quantify the influence of diffuse monovalent and divalent ions on the dynamics of biomolecular assemblies. This model employs all-atom (non-H) resolution and explicit ions, where effective potentials account for hydration effects. We first show that the model accurately predicts the number of excess Mg2+ ions for prototypical RNA systems, at a level comparable to modern coarse-grained models. We then apply the model to a complete ribosome and show how the balance between diffuse Mg2+ and K+ ions can control the dynamics of tRNA molecules during translation. The model predicts differential effects of diffuse ions on the free-energy barrier associated with tRNA entry and the energy of tRNA binding to the ribosome. Together, this analysis reveals the direct impact of diffuse ions on the dynamics of an RNP assembly.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ailun Wang
- Department of Chemistry, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 02467, United States.,Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, United States
| | - Mariana Levi
- Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Dana Research Center 111, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, United States
| | - Udayan Mohanty
- Department of Chemistry, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 02467, United States
| | - Paul C Whitford
- Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, United States.,Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Dana Research Center 111, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, United States
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22
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Kutzner C, Kniep C, Cherian A, Nordstrom L, Grubmüller H, de Groot BL, Gapsys V. GROMACS in the Cloud: A Global Supercomputer to Speed Up Alchemical Drug Design. J Chem Inf Model 2022; 62:1691-1711. [PMID: 35353508 PMCID: PMC9006219 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jcim.2c00044] [Citation(s) in RCA: 26] [Impact Index Per Article: 13.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/14/2022] [Indexed: 12/16/2022]
Abstract
We assess costs and efficiency of state-of-the-art high-performance cloud computing and compare the results to traditional on-premises compute clusters. Our use case is atomistic simulations carried out with the GROMACS molecular dynamics (MD) toolkit with a particular focus on alchemical protein-ligand binding free energy calculations. We set up a compute cluster in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud that incorporates various different instances with Intel, AMD, and ARM CPUs, some with GPU acceleration. Using representative biomolecular simulation systems, we benchmark how GROMACS performs on individual instances and across multiple instances. Thereby we assess which instances deliver the highest performance and which are the most cost-efficient ones for our use case. We find that, in terms of total costs, including hardware, personnel, room, energy, and cooling, producing MD trajectories in the cloud can be about as cost-efficient as an on-premises cluster given that optimal cloud instances are chosen. Further, we find that high-throughput ligand-screening can be accelerated dramatically by using global cloud resources. For a ligand screening study consisting of 19 872 independent simulations or ∼200 μs of combined simulation trajectory, we made use of diverse hardware available in the cloud at the time of the study. The computations scaled-up to reach peak performance using more than 4 000 instances, 140 000 cores, and 3 000 GPUs simultaneously. Our simulation ensemble finished in about 2 days in the cloud, while weeks would be required to complete the task on a typical on-premises cluster consisting of several hundred nodes.
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Affiliation(s)
- Carsten Kutzner
- Department
of Theoretical and Computational Biophysics, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Am Fassberg 11, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
| | - Christian Kniep
- Amazon
Development Center Germany, Amazon Web Services, Krausenstr. 38, 10117 Berlin, Germany
| | - Austin Cherian
- Amazon
Web Services Singapore Pte Ltd, 23 Church St, #10-01, Singapore 049481
| | - Ludvig Nordstrom
- Amazon
Web Services, 60 Holborn
Viaduct, London EC1A 2FD, United Kingdom
| | - Helmut Grubmüller
- Department
of Theoretical and Computational Biophysics, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Am Fassberg 11, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
| | - Bert L. de Groot
- Computational
Biomolecular Dynamics Group, Max Planck
Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Am Fassberg 11, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
| | - Vytautas Gapsys
- Computational
Biomolecular Dynamics Group, Max Planck
Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Am Fassberg 11, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
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23
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Abstract
Structure determination by cryo electron microscopy (cryo-EM) provides information on structural heterogeneity and ensembles at atomic resolution. To obtain cryo-EM images of macromolecules, the samples are first rapidly cooled down to cryogenic temperatures. To what extent the structural ensemble is perturbed during cooling is currently unknown. Here, to quantify the effects of cooling, we combined continuum model calculations of the temperature drop, molecular dynamics simulations of a ribosome complex before and during cooling with kinetic models. Our results suggest that three effects markedly contribute to the narrowing of the structural ensembles: thermal contraction, reduced thermal motion within local potential wells, and the equilibration into lower free-energy conformations by overcoming separating free-energy barriers. During cooling, barrier heights below 10 kJ/mol were found to be overcome, which is expected to reduce B-factors in ensembles imaged by cryo-EM. Our approach now enables the quantification of the heterogeneity of room-temperature ensembles from cryo-EM structures.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lars V Bock
- Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Department, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Göttingen, Germany.
| | - Helmut Grubmüller
- Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Department, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Göttingen, Germany
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24
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Karaca E, Prévost C, Sacquin-Mora S. Modeling the Dynamics of Protein-Protein Interfaces, How and Why? Molecules 2022; 27:1841. [PMID: 35335203 PMCID: PMC8950966 DOI: 10.3390/molecules27061841] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/29/2022] [Revised: 03/06/2022] [Accepted: 03/08/2022] [Indexed: 12/07/2022] Open
Abstract
Protein-protein assemblies act as a key component in numerous cellular processes. Their accurate modeling at the atomic level remains a challenge for structural biology. To address this challenge, several docking and a handful of deep learning methodologies focus on modeling protein-protein interfaces. Although the outcome of these methods has been assessed using static reference structures, more and more data point to the fact that the interaction stability and specificity is encoded in the dynamics of these interfaces. Therefore, this dynamics information must be taken into account when modeling and assessing protein interactions at the atomistic scale. Expanding on this, our review initially focuses on the recent computational strategies aiming at investigating protein-protein interfaces in a dynamic fashion using enhanced sampling, multi-scale modeling, and experimental data integration. Then, we discuss how interface dynamics report on the function of protein assemblies in globular complexes, in fuzzy complexes containing intrinsically disordered proteins, as well as in active complexes, where chemical reactions take place across the protein-protein interface.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ezgi Karaca
- Izmir Biomedicine and Genome Center, Izmir 35340, Turkey;
- Izmir International Biomedicine and Genome Institute, Dokuz Eylul University, Izmir 35340, Turkey
| | - Chantal Prévost
- CNRS, Laboratoire de Biochimie Théorique, UPR9080, Université de Paris, 13 rue Pierre et Marie Curie, 75005 Paris, France;
- Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique, Fondation Edmond de Rothschild, PSL Research University, 75006 Paris, France
| | - Sophie Sacquin-Mora
- CNRS, Laboratoire de Biochimie Théorique, UPR9080, Université de Paris, 13 rue Pierre et Marie Curie, 75005 Paris, France;
- Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique, Fondation Edmond de Rothschild, PSL Research University, 75006 Paris, France
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25
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Kišonaitė M, Wild K, Lapouge K, Ruppert T, Sinning I. High-resolution structures of a thermophilic eukaryotic 80S ribosome reveal atomistic details of translocation. Nat Commun 2022; 13:476. [PMID: 35079002 PMCID: PMC8789840 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-27967-9] [Citation(s) in RCA: 19] [Impact Index Per Article: 9.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/02/2021] [Accepted: 01/02/2022] [Indexed: 11/09/2022] Open
Abstract
AbstractRibosomes are complex and highly conserved ribonucleoprotein assemblies catalyzing protein biosynthesis in every organism. Here we present high-resolution cryo-EM structures of the 80S ribosome from a thermophilic fungus in two rotational states, which due to increased 80S stability provide a number of mechanistic details of eukaryotic translation. We identify a universally conserved ‘nested base-triple knot’ in the 26S rRNA at the polypeptide tunnel exit with a bulged-out nucleotide that likely serves as an adaptable element for nascent chain containment and handover. We visualize the structure and dynamics of the ribosome protective factor Stm1 upon ribosomal 40S head swiveling. We describe the structural impact of a unique and essential m1acp3 Ψ 18S rRNA hyper-modification embracing the anticodon wobble-position for eukaryotic tRNA and mRNA translocation. We complete the eEF2-GTPase switch cycle describing the GDP-bound post-hydrolysis state. Taken together, our data and their integration into the structural landscape of 80S ribosomes furthers our understanding of protein biogenesis.
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26
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Di Palma F, Decherchi S, Pardo-Avila F, Succi S, Levitt M, von Heijne G, Cavalli A. Probing Interplays between Human XBP1u Translational Arrest Peptide and 80S Ribosome. J Chem Theory Comput 2021; 18:1905-1914. [PMID: 34881571 PMCID: PMC8908735 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jctc.1c00796] [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] [Indexed: 02/08/2023]
Abstract
![]()
The ribosome stalling
mechanism is a crucial biological process,
yet its atomistic underpinning is still elusive. In this framework,
the human XBP1u translational arrest peptide (AP) plays a central
role in regulating the unfolded protein response (UPR) in eukaryotic
cells. Here, we report multimicrosecond all-atom molecular dynamics
simulations designed to probe the interactions between the XBP1u AP
and the mammalian ribosome exit tunnel, both for the wild type AP
and for four mutant variants of different arrest potencies. Enhanced
sampling simulations allow investigating the AP release process of
the different variants, shedding light on this complex mechanism.
The present outcomes are in qualitative/quantitative agreement with
available experimental data. In conclusion, we provide an unprecedented
atomistic picture of this biological process and clear-cut insights
into the key AP–ribosome interactions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Francesco Di Palma
- Computational & Chemical Biology, Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Via Morego 30, I-16163 Genova, Italy
| | - Sergio Decherchi
- Computational & Chemical Biology, Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Via Morego 30, I-16163 Genova, Italy
| | - Fátima Pardo-Avila
- Department of Structural Biology, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California 94305, United States
| | - Sauro Succi
- Computational & Chemical Biology, Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Via Morego 30, I-16163 Genova, Italy.,Center for Life Nano & Neurosciences at La Sapienza, Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, via Regina Elena, 295, I-00161 Roma, Italy.,Physics Department, Harvard University, 17 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, United States
| | - Michael Levitt
- Department of Structural Biology, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California 94305, United States
| | - Gunnar von Heijne
- Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden.,Science for Life Laboratory, Stockholm University, 17165 Solna, Sweden
| | - Andrea Cavalli
- Computational & Chemical Biology, Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Via Morego 30, I-16163 Genova, Italy.,Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology, University of Bologna, Via Belmeloro 6, I-40126 Bologna, Italy
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27
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Hassan A, Byju S, Whitford PC. The energetics of subunit rotation in the ribosome. Biophys Rev 2021; 13:1029-1037. [PMID: 35059025 PMCID: PMC8724491 DOI: 10.1007/s12551-021-00877-8] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/22/2021] [Accepted: 10/26/2021] [Indexed: 12/12/2022] Open
Abstract
Protein synthesis in the cell is controlled by an elaborate sequence of conformational rearrangements in the ribosome. The composition of a ribosome varies by species, though they typically contain ∼ 50-100 RNA and protein molecules. While advances in structural techniques have revolutionized our understanding of long-lived conformational states, a vast range of transiently visited configurations can not be directly observed. In these cases, computational/simulation methods can be used to understand the mechanical properties of the ribosome. Insights from these approaches can then help guide next-generation experimental measurements. In this short review, we discuss theoretical strategies that have been deployed to quantitatively describe the energetics of collective rearrangements in the ribosome. We focus on efforts to probe large-scale subunit rotation events, which involve the coordinated displacement of large numbers of atoms (tens of thousands). These investigations are revealing how the molecular structure of the ribosome encodes the mechanical properties that control large-scale dynamics.
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Affiliation(s)
- Asem Hassan
- Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, 02115 MA USA
- Physics Department, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, 02115 MA USA
| | - Sandra Byju
- Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, 02115 MA USA
- Physics Department, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, 02115 MA USA
| | - Paul C. Whitford
- Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, 02115 MA USA
- Physics Department, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, 02115 MA USA
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28
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Petrychenko V, Peng BZ, de A P Schwarzer AC, Peske F, Rodnina MV, Fischer N. Structural mechanism of GTPase-powered ribosome-tRNA movement. Nat Commun 2021; 12:5933. [PMID: 34635670 PMCID: PMC8505512 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26133-x] [Citation(s) in RCA: 32] [Impact Index Per Article: 10.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/01/2021] [Accepted: 09/17/2021] [Indexed: 11/25/2022] Open
Abstract
GTPases are regulators of cell signaling acting as molecular switches. The translational GTPase EF-G stands out, as it uses GTP hydrolysis to generate force and promote the movement of the ribosome along the mRNA. The key unresolved question is how GTP hydrolysis drives molecular movement. Here, we visualize the GTPase-powered step of ongoing translocation by time-resolved cryo-EM. EF-G in the active GDP-Pi form stabilizes the rotated conformation of ribosomal subunits and induces twisting of the sarcin-ricin loop of the 23 S rRNA. Refolding of the GTPase switch regions upon Pi release initiates a large-scale rigid-body rotation of EF-G pivoting around the sarcin-ricin loop that facilitates back rotation of the ribosomal subunits and forward swiveling of the head domain of the small subunit, ultimately driving tRNA forward movement. The findings demonstrate how a GTPase orchestrates spontaneous thermal fluctuations of a large RNA-protein complex into force-generating molecular movement.
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MESH Headings
- Binding Sites
- Biomechanical Phenomena
- Cryoelectron Microscopy
- Escherichia coli/genetics
- Escherichia coli/metabolism
- Guanosine Triphosphate/chemistry
- Guanosine Triphosphate/metabolism
- Hydrolysis
- Kinetics
- Models, Molecular
- Peptide Elongation Factor G/chemistry
- Peptide Elongation Factor G/genetics
- Peptide Elongation Factor G/metabolism
- Protein Binding
- Protein Biosynthesis
- Protein Conformation, alpha-Helical
- Protein Conformation, beta-Strand
- Protein Folding
- Protein Interaction Domains and Motifs
- RNA, Messenger/chemistry
- RNA, Messenger/genetics
- RNA, Messenger/metabolism
- RNA, Ribosomal, 23S/chemistry
- RNA, Ribosomal, 23S/genetics
- RNA, Ribosomal, 23S/metabolism
- RNA, Transfer/chemistry
- RNA, Transfer/genetics
- RNA, Transfer/metabolism
- Ribosomes/metabolism
- Ribosomes/ultrastructure
- Thermodynamics
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Affiliation(s)
- Valentyn Petrychenko
- Department of Structural Dynamics, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany
| | - Bee-Zen Peng
- Department of Physical Biochemistry, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany
| | - Ana C de A P Schwarzer
- Department of Structural Dynamics, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany
- Department of Molecular Biology, University Medical Center Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
| | - Frank Peske
- Department of Physical Biochemistry, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany
| | - Marina V Rodnina
- Department of Physical Biochemistry, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany.
| | - Niels Fischer
- Department of Structural Dynamics, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany.
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29
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Schultze S, Grubmüller H. Time-Lagged Independent Component Analysis of Random Walks and Protein Dynamics. J Chem Theory Comput 2021; 17:5766-5776. [PMID: 34449229 PMCID: PMC8444338 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jctc.1c00273] [Citation(s) in RCA: 20] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/25/2023]
Abstract
![]()
Time-lagged independent
component analysis (tICA) is a widely used
dimension reduction method for the analysis of molecular dynamics
(MD) trajectories and has proven particularly useful for the construction
of protein dynamics Markov models. It identifies those “slow”
collective degrees of freedom onto which the projections of a given
trajectory show maximal autocorrelation for a given lag time. Here
we ask how much information on the actual protein dynamics and, in
particular, the free energy landscape that governs these dynamics
the tICA-projections of MD-trajectories contain, as opposed to noise
due to the inherently stochastic nature of each trajectory. To answer
this question, we have analyzed the tICA-projections of high dimensional
random walks using a combination of analytical and numerical methods.
We find that the projections resemble cosine functions and strongly
depend on the lag time, exhibiting strikingly complex behavior. In
particular, and contrary to previous studies of principal component
projections, the projections change noncontinuously with increasing
lag time. The tICA-projections of selected 1 μs protein trajectories
and those of random walks are strikingly similar, particularly for
larger proteins, suggesting that these trajectories contain only little
information on the energy landscape that governs the actual protein
dynamics. Further the tICA-projections of random walks show clusters
very similar to those observed for the protein trajectories, suggesting
that clusters in the tICA-projections of protein trajectories do not
necessarily reflect local minima in the free energy landscape. We
also conclude that, in addition to the previous finding that certain
ensemble properties of nonconverged protein trajectories resemble
those of random walks; this is also true for their time correlations.
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Affiliation(s)
- Steffen Schultze
- Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, 37077, Germany
| | - Helmut Grubmüller
- Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, 37077, Germany
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30
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Paleskava A, Maksimova EM, Vinogradova DS, Kasatsky PS, Kirillov SV, Konevega AL. Differential Contribution of Protein Factors and 70S Ribosome to Elongation. Int J Mol Sci 2021; 22:9614. [PMID: 34502523 PMCID: PMC8431766 DOI: 10.3390/ijms22179614] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/05/2021] [Revised: 08/30/2021] [Accepted: 09/02/2021] [Indexed: 11/16/2022] Open
Abstract
The growth of the polypeptide chain occurs due to the fast and coordinated work of the ribosome and protein elongation factors, EF-Tu and EF-G. However, the exact contribution of each of these components in the overall balance of translation kinetics remains not fully understood. We created an in vitro translation system Escherichia coli replacing either elongation factor with heterologous thermophilic protein from Thermus thermophilus. The rates of the A-site binding and decoding reactions decreased an order of magnitude in the presence of thermophilic EF-Tu, indicating that the kinetics of aminoacyl-tRNA delivery depends on the properties of the elongation factor. On the contrary, thermophilic EF-G demonstrated the same translocation kinetics as a mesophilic protein. Effects of translocation inhibitors (spectinomycin, hygromycin B, viomycin and streptomycin) were also similar for both proteins. Thus, the process of translocation largely relies on the interaction of tRNAs and the ribosome and can be efficiently catalysed by thermophilic EF-G even at suboptimal temperatures.
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Affiliation(s)
- Alena Paleskava
- Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, NRC “Kurchatov Institute”, 188300 Gatchina, Russia; (A.P.); (E.M.M.); (D.S.V.); (P.S.K.); (S.V.K.)
- Institute of Biomedical Systems and Biotechnology, Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, 195251 St. Petersburg, Russia
| | - Elena M. Maksimova
- Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, NRC “Kurchatov Institute”, 188300 Gatchina, Russia; (A.P.); (E.M.M.); (D.S.V.); (P.S.K.); (S.V.K.)
| | - Daria S. Vinogradova
- Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, NRC “Kurchatov Institute”, 188300 Gatchina, Russia; (A.P.); (E.M.M.); (D.S.V.); (P.S.K.); (S.V.K.)
| | - Pavel S. Kasatsky
- Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, NRC “Kurchatov Institute”, 188300 Gatchina, Russia; (A.P.); (E.M.M.); (D.S.V.); (P.S.K.); (S.V.K.)
| | - Stanislav V. Kirillov
- Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, NRC “Kurchatov Institute”, 188300 Gatchina, Russia; (A.P.); (E.M.M.); (D.S.V.); (P.S.K.); (S.V.K.)
| | - Andrey L. Konevega
- Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, NRC “Kurchatov Institute”, 188300 Gatchina, Russia; (A.P.); (E.M.M.); (D.S.V.); (P.S.K.); (S.V.K.)
- Institute of Biomedical Systems and Biotechnology, Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, 195251 St. Petersburg, Russia
- NRC “Kurchatov Institute”, 123182 Moscow, Russia
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31
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Freitas FC, Fuchs G, de Oliveira RJ, Whitford PC. The dynamics of subunit rotation in a eukaryotic ribosome. BIOPHYSICA 2021; 1:204-221. [PMID: 37484008 PMCID: PMC10361705 DOI: 10.3390/biophysica1020016] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 07/25/2023]
Abstract
Protein synthesis by the ribosome is coordinated by an intricate series of large-scale conformational rearrangements. Structural studies can provide information about long-lived states, however biological kinetics are controlled by the intervening free-energy barriers. While there has been progress describing the energy landscapes of bacterial ribosomes, very little is known about the energetics of large-scale rearrangements in eukaryotic systems. To address this topic, we constructed an all-atom model with simplified energetics and performed simulations of subunit rotation in the yeast ribosome. In these simulations, the small subunit (SSU; ~1MDa) undergoes spontaneous and reversible rotations (~8°). By enabling the simulation of this rearrangement under equilibrium conditions, these calculations provide initial insights into the molecular factors that control dynamics in eukaryotic ribosomes. Through this, we are able to identify specific inter-subunit interactions that have a pronounced influence on the rate-limiting free-energy barrier. We also show that, as a result of changes in molecular flexibility, the thermodynamic balance between the rotated and unrotated states is temperature-dependent. This effect may be interpreted in terms of differential molecular flexibility within the rotated and unrotated states. Together, these calculations provide a foundation, upon which the field may begin to dissect the energetics of these complex molecular machines.
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Affiliation(s)
- Frederico Campos Freitas
- Laboratório de Biofísica Teórica, Departamento de Física, Instituto de Ciências Exatas, Naturais e Educação, Universidade Federal do Triângulo Mineiro, Uberaba, MG, Brazil
| | - Gabriele Fuchs
- Department of Biological Sciences, The RNA Institute, University at Albany 1400 Washington Ave, Albany, NY,12222
| | - Ronaldo Junio de Oliveira
- Laboratório de Biofísica Teórica, Departamento de Física, Instituto de Ciências Exatas, Naturais e Educação, Universidade Federal do Triângulo Mineiro, Uberaba, MG, Brazil
| | - Paul Charles Whitford
- Department of Physics, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115
- Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115
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32
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Sosorev A, Kharlanov O. Organic nanoelectronics inside us: charge transport and localization in RNA could orchestrate ribosome operation. Phys Chem Chem Phys 2021; 23:7037-7047. [PMID: 33448272 DOI: 10.1039/d0cp04970k] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/21/2022]
Abstract
Translation - protein synthesis at the ribonucleic acid (RNA) based molecular machine, the ribosome, - proceeds in a similar manner in all life forms. However, despite several decades of research, the physics underlying this process remains enigmatic. Specifically, during translation, a ribosome undergoes large-scale conformational changes of its distant parts, and these motions are coordinated by an unknown mechanism. In this study, we suggest that such a mechanism could be related to charge (electron hole) transport along and between the RNA molecules, localization of these charges at certain sites and successive relaxation of the molecular geometry. Thus, we suppose that RNA-based molecular machines, e.g., the ribosome, could be electronically controlled, having "wires", "actuators", "a battery", and other "circuitry". Taking transfer RNA as an example, we justify the reasonability of our suggestion using ab initio and atomistic simulations. Specifically, very large hole transfer integrals between the nucleotides (up to above 100 meV) are observed so that the hole can migrate over nearly the whole tRNA molecule. Hole localization at several guanines located at functionally important sites (G27, G10, G34 and G63) is predicted, which is shown to induce geometry changes in these sites, their neighborhoods and even rather distant moieties. If our hypothesis is right, we anticipate that our findings will qualitatively advance the understanding of the key biological processes and could inspire novel approaches in medicine.
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Affiliation(s)
- Andrey Sosorev
- Shemyakin-Ovchinnikov Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Ulitsa Miklukho-Maklaya, 16/10, Moscow, GSP-7, 117997, Russia.
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33
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Sahakyan H, Nazaryan K, Mushegian A, Sorokina I. Energy-dependent protein folding: modeling how a protein folding machine may work. F1000Res 2021; 10:3. [PMID: 33633838 PMCID: PMC7898354 DOI: 10.12688/f1000research.28175.1] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Accepted: 12/18/2020] [Indexed: 12/17/2022] Open
Abstract
Background: Proteins fold robustly and reproducibly in vivo, but many cannot fold in vitro in isolation from cellular components. Despite the remarkable progress that has been achieved by the artificial intelligence approaches in predicting the protein native conformations, the pathways that lead to such conformations, either in vitro or in vivo, remain largely unknown. The slow progress in recapitulating protein folding pathways in silico may be an indication of the fundamental deficiencies in our understanding of folding as it occurs in nature. Here we consider the possibility that protein folding in living cells may not be driven solely by the decrease in Gibbs free energy and propose that protein folding in vivo should be modeled as an active energy-dependent process. The mechanism of action of such a protein folding machine might include direct manipulation of the peptide backbone. Methods: To show the feasibility of a protein folding machine, we conducted molecular dynamics simulations that were augmented by the application of mechanical force to rotate the C-terminal amino acid while simultaneously limiting the N-terminal amino acid movements. Results: Remarkably, the addition of this simple manipulation of peptide backbones to the standard molecular dynamics simulation indeed facilitated the formation of native structures in five diverse alpha-helical peptides. Steric clashes that arise in the peptides due to the forced directional rotation resulted in the behavior of the peptide backbone no longer resembling a freely jointed chain. Conclusions: These simulations show the feasibility of a protein folding machine operating under the conditions when the movements of the polypeptide backbone are restricted by applying external forces and constraints. Further investigation is needed to see whether such an effect may play a role during co-translational protein folding in vivo and how it can be utilized to facilitate folding of proteins in artificial environments.
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Affiliation(s)
- Harutyun Sahakyan
- Institute of Molecular Biology, Academy of Sciences of Republic of Armenia, Yerevan, Armenia
| | - Karen Nazaryan
- Institute of Molecular Biology, Academy of Sciences of Republic of Armenia, Yerevan, Armenia
| | - Arcady Mushegian
- Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, National Science Foundation, Alexandria, USA
- Clare Hall College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
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34
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Sali A. From integrative structural biology to cell biology. J Biol Chem 2021; 296:100743. [PMID: 33957123 PMCID: PMC8203844 DOI: 10.1016/j.jbc.2021.100743] [Citation(s) in RCA: 43] [Impact Index Per Article: 14.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/05/2021] [Revised: 04/09/2021] [Accepted: 04/30/2021] [Indexed: 12/16/2022] Open
Abstract
Integrative modeling is an increasingly important tool in structural biology, providing structures by combining data from varied experimental methods and prior information. As a result, molecular architectures of large, heterogeneous, and dynamic systems, such as the ∼52-MDa Nuclear Pore Complex, can be mapped with useful accuracy, precision, and completeness. Key challenges in improving integrative modeling include expanding model representations, increasing the variety of input data and prior information, quantifying a match between input information and a model in a Bayesian fashion, inventing more efficient structural sampling, as well as developing better model validation, analysis, and visualization. In addition, two community-level challenges in integrative modeling are being addressed under the auspices of the Worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB). First, the impact of integrative structures is maximized by PDB-Development, a prototype wwPDB repository for archiving, validating, visualizing, and disseminating integrative structures. Second, the scope of structural biology is expanded by linking the wwPDB resource for integrative structures with archives of data that have not been generally used for structure determination but are increasingly important for computing integrative structures, such as data from various types of mass spectrometry, spectroscopy, optical microscopy, proteomics, and genetics. To address the largest of modeling problems, a type of integrative modeling called metamodeling is being developed; metamodeling combines different types of input models as opposed to different types of data to compute an output model. Collectively, these developments will facilitate the structural biology mindset in cell biology and underpin spatiotemporal mapping of the entire cell.
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Affiliation(s)
- Andrej Sali
- Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics Protein Data Bank, the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, the Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI), and the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA.
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35
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A steric gate controls P/E hybrid-state formation of tRNA on the ribosome. Nat Commun 2020; 11:5706. [PMID: 33177497 PMCID: PMC7658246 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19450-0] [Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/09/2020] [Accepted: 10/15/2020] [Indexed: 12/19/2022] Open
Abstract
The ribosome is a biomolecular machine that undergoes multiple large-scale structural rearrangements during protein elongation. Here, we focus on a conformational rearrangement during translocation, known as P/E hybrid-state formation. Using a model that explicitly represents all non-hydrogen atoms, we simulated more than 120 spontaneous transitions, where the tRNA molecule is displaced between the P and E sites of the large subunit. In addition to predicting a free-energy landscape that is consistent with previous experimental observations, the simulations reveal how a six-residue gate-like region can limit P/E formation, where sub-angstrom structural perturbations lead to an order-of-magnitude change in kinetics. Thus, this precisely defined set of residues represents a novel target that may be used to control functional dynamics in bacterial ribosomes. This theoretical analysis establishes a direct relationship between ribosome structure and large-scale dynamics, and it suggests how next-generation experiments may precisely dissect the energetics of hybrid formation on the ribosome. The ribosome undergoes multiple large-scale structural rearrangements during protein elongation. Here the authors present an all-atom model of the ribosome to study the energetics of P/E hybrid-state formation, an early conformational rearrangement occurring during translocation.
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36
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Giulini M, Menichetti R, Shell MS, Potestio R. An Information-Theory-Based Approach for Optimal Model Reduction of Biomolecules. J Chem Theory Comput 2020; 16:6795-6813. [PMID: 33108737 PMCID: PMC7659038 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jctc.0c00676] [Citation(s) in RCA: 31] [Impact Index Per Article: 7.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/29/2020] [Indexed: 02/06/2023]
Abstract
In theoretical modeling of a physical system, a crucial step consists of the identification of those degrees of freedom that enable a synthetic yet informative representation of it. While in some cases this selection can be carried out on the basis of intuition and experience, straightforward discrimination of the important features from the negligible ones is difficult for many complex systems, most notably heteropolymers and large biomolecules. We here present a thermodynamics-based theoretical framework to gauge the effectiveness of a given simplified representation by measuring its information content. We employ this method to identify those reduced descriptions of proteins, in terms of a subset of their atoms, that retain the largest amount of information from the original model; we show that these highly informative representations share common features that are intrinsically related to the biological properties of the proteins under examination, thereby establishing a bridge between protein structure, energetics, and function.
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Affiliation(s)
- Marco Giulini
- Physics
Department, University of Trento, via Sommarive 14, I-38123 Trento, Italy
- INFN-TIFPA, Trento
Institute for Fundamental Physics and Applications, I-38123 Trento, Italy
| | - Roberto Menichetti
- Physics
Department, University of Trento, via Sommarive 14, I-38123 Trento, Italy
- INFN-TIFPA, Trento
Institute for Fundamental Physics and Applications, I-38123 Trento, Italy
| | - M. Scott Shell
- Department
of Chemical Engineering, University of California
Santa Barbara, Santa
Barbara, California 93106, United States
| | - Raffaello Potestio
- Physics
Department, University of Trento, via Sommarive 14, I-38123 Trento, Italy
- INFN-TIFPA, Trento
Institute for Fundamental Physics and Applications, I-38123 Trento, Italy
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37
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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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38
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Kohnke B, Kutzner C, Grubmüller H. A GPU-Accelerated Fast Multipole Method for GROMACS: Performance and Accuracy. J Chem Theory Comput 2020; 16:6938-6949. [PMID: 33084336 PMCID: PMC7660746 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jctc.0c00744] [Citation(s) in RCA: 49] [Impact Index Per Article: 12.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/28/2022]
Abstract
An important and computationally demanding part of molecular dynamics simulations is the calculation of long-range electrostatic interactions. Today, the prevalent method to compute these interactions is particle mesh Ewald (PME). The PME implementation in the GROMACS molecular dynamics package is extremely fast on individual GPU nodes. However, for large scale multinode parallel simulations, PME becomes the main scaling bottleneck as it requires all-to-all communication between the nodes; as a consequence, the number of exchanged messages scales quadratically with the number of involved nodes in that communication step. To enable efficient and scalable biomolecular simulations on future exascale supercomputers, clearly a method with a better scaling property is required. The fast multipole method (FMM) is such a method. As a first step on the path to exascale, we have implemented a performance-optimized, highly efficient GPU FMM and integrated it into GROMACS as an alternative to PME. For a fair performance comparison between FMM and PME, we first assessed the accuracies of the methods for various sets of input parameters. With parameters yielding similar accuracies for both methods, we determined the performance of GROMACS with FMM and compared it to PME for exemplary benchmark systems. We found that FMM with a multipole order of 8 yields electrostatic forces that are as accurate as PME with standard parameters. Further, for typical mixed-precision simulation settings, FMM does not lead to an increased energy drift with multipole orders of 8 or larger. Whereas an ≈50 000 atom simulation system with our FMM reaches only about a third of the performance with PME, for systems with large dimensions and inhomogeneous particle distribution, e.g., aerosol systems with water droplets floating in a vacuum, FMM substantially outperforms PME already on a single node.
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Affiliation(s)
- Bartosz Kohnke
- Theoretical and Computational Biophysics, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Am Fassberg 11, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
| | - Carsten Kutzner
- Theoretical and Computational Biophysics, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Am Fassberg 11, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
| | - Helmut Grubmüller
- Theoretical and Computational Biophysics, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Am Fassberg 11, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
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39
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Poitevin F, Kushner A, Li X, Dao Duc K. Structural Heterogeneities of the Ribosome: New Frontiers and Opportunities for Cryo-EM. Molecules 2020; 25:E4262. [PMID: 32957592 PMCID: PMC7570653 DOI: 10.3390/molecules25184262] [Citation(s) in RCA: 16] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/25/2020] [Revised: 09/11/2020] [Accepted: 09/15/2020] [Indexed: 12/18/2022] Open
Abstract
The extent of ribosomal heterogeneity has caught increasing interest over the past few years, as recent studies have highlighted the presence of structural variations of the ribosome. More precisely, the heterogeneity of the ribosome covers multiple scales, including the dynamical aspects of ribosomal motion at the single particle level, specialization at the cellular and subcellular scale, or evolutionary differences across species. Upon solving the ribosome atomic structure at medium to high resolution, cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has enabled investigating all these forms of heterogeneity. In this review, we present some recent advances in quantifying ribosome heterogeneity, with a focus on the conformational and evolutionary variations of the ribosome and their functional implications. These efforts highlight the need for new computational methods and comparative tools, to comprehensively model the continuous conformational transition pathways of the ribosome, as well as its evolution. While developing these methods presents some important challenges, it also provides an opportunity to extend our interpretation and usage of cryo-EM data, which would more generally benefit the study of molecular dynamics and evolution of proteins and other complexes.
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Affiliation(s)
- Frédéric Poitevin
- Department of LCLS Data Analytics, Linac Coherent Light Source, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA;
| | - Artem Kushner
- Department of Mathematics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada; (A.K.); (X.L.)
- Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada
| | - Xinpei Li
- Department of Mathematics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada; (A.K.); (X.L.)
- Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada
| | - Khanh Dao Duc
- Department of Mathematics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada; (A.K.); (X.L.)
- Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada
- Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada
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40
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Liu J, Li X. A computational investigation of particle acoustic agglomeration in a resonance tube. POWDER TECHNOL 2020. [DOI: 10.1016/j.powtec.2020.07.042] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/29/2022]
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41
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Rodnina MV, Peske F, Peng BZ, Belardinelli R, Wintermeyer W. Converting GTP hydrolysis into motion: versatile translational elongation factor G. Biol Chem 2020; 401:131-142. [PMID: 31600135 DOI: 10.1515/hsz-2019-0313] [Citation(s) in RCA: 31] [Impact Index Per Article: 7.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/10/2019] [Accepted: 08/24/2019] [Indexed: 12/16/2022]
Abstract
Elongation factor G (EF-G) is a translational GTPase that acts at several stages of protein synthesis. Its canonical function is to catalyze tRNA movement during translation elongation, but it also acts at the last step of translation to promote ribosome recycling. Moreover, EF-G has additional functions, such as helping the ribosome to maintain the mRNA reading frame or to slide over non-coding stretches of the mRNA. EF-G has an unconventional GTPase cycle that couples the energy of GTP hydrolysis to movement. EF-G facilitates movement in the GDP-Pi form. To convert the energy of hydrolysis to movement, it requires various ligands in the A site, such as a tRNA in translocation, an mRNA secondary structure element in ribosome sliding, or ribosome recycling factor in post-termination complex disassembly. The ligand defines the direction and timing of EF-G-facilitated motion. In this review, we summarize recent advances in understanding the mechanism of EF-G action as a remarkable force-generating GTPase.
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Affiliation(s)
- Marina V Rodnina
- Department of Physical Biochemistry, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Am Fassberg 11, D-37077 Göttingen, Germany
| | - Frank Peske
- Department of Physical Biochemistry, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Am Fassberg 11, D-37077 Göttingen, Germany
| | - Bee-Zen Peng
- Department of Physical Biochemistry, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Am Fassberg 11, D-37077 Göttingen, Germany
| | - Riccardo Belardinelli
- Department of Physical Biochemistry, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Am Fassberg 11, D-37077 Göttingen, Germany
| | - Wolfgang Wintermeyer
- Department of Physical Biochemistry, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Am Fassberg 11, D-37077 Göttingen, Germany
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42
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Kummer E, Ban N. Structural insights into mammalian mitochondrial translation elongation catalyzed by mtEFG1. EMBO J 2020; 39:e104820. [PMID: 32602580 PMCID: PMC7396830 DOI: 10.15252/embj.2020104820] [Citation(s) in RCA: 30] [Impact Index Per Article: 7.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/25/2020] [Revised: 05/08/2020] [Accepted: 05/11/2020] [Indexed: 01/08/2023] Open
Abstract
Mitochondria are eukaryotic organelles of bacterial origin where respiration takes place to produce cellular chemical energy. These reactions are catalyzed by the respiratory chain complexes located in the inner mitochondrial membrane. Notably, key components of the respiratory chain complexes are encoded on the mitochondrial chromosome and their expression relies on a dedicated mitochondrial translation machinery. Defects in the mitochondrial gene expression machinery lead to a variety of diseases in humans mostly affecting tissues with high energy demand such as the nervous system, the heart, or the muscles. The mitochondrial translation system has substantially diverged from its bacterial ancestor, including alterations in the mitoribosomal architecture, multiple changes to the set of translation factors and striking reductions in otherwise conserved tRNA elements. Although a number of structures of mitochondrial ribosomes from different species have been determined, our mechanistic understanding of the mitochondrial translation cycle remains largely unexplored. Here, we present two cryo-EM reconstructions of human mitochondrial elongation factor G1 bound to the mammalian mitochondrial ribosome at two different steps of the tRNA translocation reaction during translation elongation. Our structures explain the mechanism of tRNA and mRNA translocation on the mitoribosome, the regulation of mtEFG1 activity by the ribosomal GTPase-associated center, and the basis of decreased susceptibility of mtEFG1 to the commonly used antibiotic fusidic acid.
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Affiliation(s)
- Eva Kummer
- Department of BiologyInstitute of Molecular Biology and BiophysicsSwiss Federal Institute of Technology ZurichZurichSwitzerland
| | - Nenad Ban
- Department of BiologyInstitute of Molecular Biology and BiophysicsSwiss Federal Institute of Technology ZurichZurichSwitzerland
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Bolnykh V, Rothlisberger U, Carloni P. Biomolecular Simulation: A Perspective from High Performance Computing. Isr J Chem 2020. [DOI: 10.1002/ijch.202000022] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/06/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Viacheslav Bolnykh
- Laboratory of Computational Chemistry and BiochemistryÉcole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Switzerland
| | - Ursula Rothlisberger
- Laboratory of Computational Chemistry and BiochemistryÉcole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Switzerland
| | - Paolo Carloni
- Institute for Neuroscience and Medicine and Institute for Advanced Simulations (IAS-5/INM-9) “Computational Biomedicine”, JARA-Institute INM-11 “Molecular Neuroscience and Neuroimaging”Forschungszentrum Jülich Germany
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44
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Rout MP, Sali A. Principles for Integrative Structural Biology Studies. Cell 2020; 177:1384-1403. [PMID: 31150619 DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2019.05.016] [Citation(s) in RCA: 165] [Impact Index Per Article: 41.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/14/2019] [Revised: 04/24/2019] [Accepted: 05/06/2019] [Indexed: 12/22/2022]
Abstract
Integrative structure determination is a powerful approach to modeling the structures of biological systems based on data produced by multiple experimental and theoretical methods, with implications for our understanding of cellular biology and drug discovery. This Primer introduces the theory and methods of integrative approaches, emphasizing the kinds of data that can be effectively included in developing models and using the nuclear pore complex as an example to illustrate the practice and challenges involved. These guidelines are intended to aid the researcher in understanding and applying integrative structural methods to systems of their interest and thus take advantage of this rapidly evolving field.
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Affiliation(s)
- Michael P Rout
- Laboratory of Cellular and Structural Biology, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY 10065, USA.
| | - Andrej Sali
- Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, Byers Hall, 1700 4th Street, Suite 503B, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA.
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45
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Abriata LA, Dal Peraro M. Will Cryo-Electron Microscopy Shift the Current Paradigm in Protein Structure Prediction? J Chem Inf Model 2020; 60:2443-2447. [PMID: 32134661 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jcim.0c00177] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/29/2022]
Abstract
Protein dynamics is undoubtedly a pervasive ingredient in all biological functions. However, structural biology has been strongly driven by a static-centered view of protein architecture. We argue that the recent advances of cryo-electron microscopy (EM) have the potential to more broadly explore the conformational landscapes of protein complexes and therefore will enhance our ability to predict the diverse conformations of tertiary and quaternary protein structures that are functionally relevant in physiological conditions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Luciano A Abriata
- Institute of Bioengineering, School of Life Sciences, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.,Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
| | - Matteo Dal Peraro
- Institute of Bioengineering, School of Life Sciences, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.,Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
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46
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Warias M, Grubmüller H, Bock LV. tRNA Dissociation from EF-Tu after GTP Hydrolysis: Primary Steps and Antibiotic Inhibition. Biophys J 2020; 118:151-161. [PMID: 31711607 PMCID: PMC6950810 DOI: 10.1016/j.bpj.2019.10.028] [Citation(s) in RCA: 12] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/10/2019] [Revised: 09/25/2019] [Accepted: 10/22/2019] [Indexed: 11/25/2022] Open
Abstract
In each round of ribosomal translation, the translational GTPase elongation factor Tu (EF-Tu) delivers a transfer RNA (tRNA) to the ribosome. After successful decoding, EF-Tu hydrolyzes GTP, which triggers a conformational change that ultimately results in the release of the tRNA from EF-Tu. To identify the primary steps of these conformational changes and how they are prevented by the antibiotic kirromycin, we employed all-atom explicit-solvent molecular dynamics simulations of the full ribosome-EF-Tu complex. Our results suggest that after GTP hydrolysis and Pi release, the loss of interactions between the nucleotide and the switch 1 loop of EF-Tu allows domain D1 of EF-Tu to rotate relative to domains D2 and D3 and leads to an increased flexibility of the switch 1 loop. This rotation induces a closing of the D1-D3 interface and an opening of the D1-D2 interface. We propose that the opening of the D1-D2 interface, which binds the CCA tail of the tRNA, weakens the crucial EF-Tu-tRNA interactions, which lowers tRNA binding affinity, representing the first step of tRNA release. Kirromycin binds within the D1-D3 interface, sterically blocking its closure, but does not prevent hydrolysis. The resulting increased flexibility of switch 1 explains why it is not resolved in kirromycin-bound structures.
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Affiliation(s)
- Malte Warias
- Theoretical and Computational Biophysics, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany
| | - Helmut Grubmüller
- Theoretical and Computational Biophysics, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany
| | - Lars V Bock
- Theoretical and Computational Biophysics, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany.
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47
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Structural basis for ribosome recycling by RRF and tRNA. Nat Struct Mol Biol 2019; 27:25-32. [PMID: 31873307 DOI: 10.1038/s41594-019-0350-7] [Citation(s) in RCA: 21] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/12/2019] [Accepted: 11/12/2019] [Indexed: 11/08/2022]
Abstract
The bacterial ribosome is recycled into subunits by two conserved proteins, elongation factor G (EF-G) and the ribosome recycling factor (RRF). The molecular basis for ribosome recycling by RRF and EF-G remains unclear. Here, we report the crystal structure of a posttermination Thermus thermophilus 70S ribosome complexed with EF-G, RRF and two transfer RNAs at a resolution of 3.5 Å. The deacylated tRNA in the peptidyl (P) site moves into a previously unsuspected state of binding (peptidyl/recycling, p/R) that is analogous to that seen during initiation. The terminal end of the p/R-tRNA forms nonfavorable contacts with the 50S subunit while RRF wedges next to central inter-subunit bridges, illuminating the active roles of tRNA and RRF in dissociation of ribosomal subunits. The structure uncovers a missing snapshot of tRNA as it transits between the P and exit (E) sites, providing insights into the mechanisms of ribosome recycling and tRNA translocation.
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48
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Dynamics of the context-specific translation arrest by chloramphenicol and linezolid. Nat Chem Biol 2019; 16:310-317. [PMID: 31844301 PMCID: PMC7036023 DOI: 10.1038/s41589-019-0423-2] [Citation(s) in RCA: 27] [Impact Index Per Article: 5.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/07/2019] [Accepted: 10/30/2019] [Indexed: 12/14/2022]
Abstract
Chloramphenicol (CHL) and linezolid (LZD) are antibiotics that inhibit translation. Both were thought to block peptide bond formation between all combinations of amino acids. Yet recently, a strong nascent peptide context-dependency of CHL- and LZD-induced translation arrest was discovered. Here, we probed the mechanism of action of CHL and LZD by using single-molecule Förster resonance energy transfer spectroscopy (smFRET) to monitor translation arrest induced by antibiotics. The presence of CHL or LZD does not significantly alter dynamics of protein synthesis until the arrest-motif of the nascent peptide is generated. Inhibition of peptide-bond formation compels the fully accommodated A-site tRNA to undergo repeated rounds of dissociation and non-productive rebinding. The glycyl amino-acid moiety on the A-site Gly-tRNA manages to overcome the arrest by CHL. Our results illuminate the mechanism of CHL and LZD action through their interactions with the ribosome, the nascent peptide and the incoming amino acid, perturbing elongation dynamics.
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49
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Peng BZ, Bock LV, Belardinelli R, Peske F, Grubmüller H, Rodnina MV. Active role of elongation factor G in maintaining the mRNA reading frame during translation. SCIENCE ADVANCES 2019; 5:eaax8030. [PMID: 31903418 PMCID: PMC6924986 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aax8030] [Citation(s) in RCA: 32] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/24/2019] [Accepted: 11/04/2019] [Indexed: 05/02/2023]
Abstract
During translation, the ribosome moves along the mRNA one codon at a time with the help of elongation factor G (EF-G). Spontaneous changes in the translational reading frame are extremely rare, yet how the precise triplet-wise step is maintained is not clear. Here, we show that the ribosome is prone to spontaneous frameshifting on mRNA slippery sequences, whereas EF-G restricts frameshifting. EF-G helps to maintain the mRNA reading frame by guiding the A-site transfer RNA during translocation due to specific interactions with the tip of EF-G domain 4. Furthermore, EF-G accelerates ribosome rearrangements that restore the ribosome's control over the codon-anticodon interaction at the end of the movement. Our data explain how the mRNA reading frame is maintained during translation.
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Affiliation(s)
- Bee-Zen Peng
- Department of Physical Biochemistry, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
| | - Lars V. Bock
- Department of Theoretical and Computational Biophysics, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
| | - Riccardo Belardinelli
- Department of Physical Biochemistry, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
| | - Frank Peske
- Department of Physical Biochemistry, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
| | - Helmut Grubmüller
- Department of Theoretical and Computational Biophysics, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
| | - Marina V. Rodnina
- Department of Physical Biochemistry, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
- Corresponding author.
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50
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Chan J, Takemura K, Lin HR, Chang KC, Chang YY, Joti Y, Kitao A, Yang LW. An Efficient Timer and Sizer of Biomacromolecular Motions. Structure 2019; 28:259-269.e8. [PMID: 31780433 DOI: 10.1016/j.str.2019.10.020] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/13/2019] [Revised: 08/22/2019] [Accepted: 10/30/2019] [Indexed: 11/28/2022]
Abstract
Life ticks as fast as how proteins move. Computationally expensive molecular dynamics simulation has been the only theoretical tool to gauge the time and sizes of these motions, though barely to their slowest ends. Here, we convert a computationally cheap elastic network model (ENM) into a molecular timer and sizer to gauge the slowest functional motions of structured biomolecules. Quasi-harmonic analysis, fluctuation profile matching, and the Wiener-Khintchine theorem are used to define the "time periods," t, for anharmonic principal components (PCs), which are validated by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) order parameters. The PCs with their respective "time periods" are mapped to the eigenvalues (λENM) of the corresponding ENM modes. Thus, the power laws t(ns) = 56.1λENM-1.6 and σ2(Å2) = 32.7λENM-3.0 can be established allowing the characterization of the timescales of NMR-resolved conformers, crystallographic anisotropic displacement parameters, and important ribosomal motions, as well as motional sizes of the latter.
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Affiliation(s)
- Justin Chan
- Institute of Bioinformatics and Structural Biology, National Tsing Hua Univ., No. 101, Section 2, Kuang-Fu Road, Hsinchu 30013, Taiwan; Bioinformatics Program, Taiwan International Graduate Program, Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
| | - Kazuhiro Takemura
- School of Life Science and Technology, Tokyo Institute of Technology, M6-13, 2-12-1 Ookayama, Meguro, Tokyo 152-8550, Japan
| | - Hong-Rui Lin
- Institute of Bioinformatics and Structural Biology, National Tsing Hua Univ., No. 101, Section 2, Kuang-Fu Road, Hsinchu 30013, Taiwan
| | - Kai-Chun Chang
- Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
| | - Yuan-Yu Chang
- Institute of Bioinformatics and Structural Biology, National Tsing Hua Univ., No. 101, Section 2, Kuang-Fu Road, Hsinchu 30013, Taiwan
| | - Yasumasa Joti
- XFEL Utilization Division, Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute, 1-1-1 Kouto, Sayo-cho, Sayo-gun, Hyogo 679-5198, Japan
| | - Akio Kitao
- School of Life Science and Technology, Tokyo Institute of Technology, M6-13, 2-12-1 Ookayama, Meguro, Tokyo 152-8550, Japan.
| | - Lee-Wei Yang
- Institute of Bioinformatics and Structural Biology, National Tsing Hua Univ., No. 101, Section 2, Kuang-Fu Road, Hsinchu 30013, Taiwan; Bioinformatics Program, Taiwan International Graduate Program, Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan; Physics Division, National Center for Theoretical Sciences, Hsinchu, Taiwan.
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