The air-water interface stabilizes α-helical conformations of the insulin B-chain

Insulin fibrillation under physicochemical parameters of bioprocessing and intervention by peptides and surface-active agents

Even after the centenary celebration of insulin discovery, there prevail challenges concerning insulin aggregation, not only after repeated administration but also during industrial production, storage, transport, and delivery, significantly impacting protein quality, efficacy, and effectiveness. The aggregation reduces insulin bioavailability, increasing the risk of heightened immunogenicity, posing a threat to patient health, and creating a dent in the golden success story of insulin therapy. Insulin experiences various physicochemical and mechanical stresses due to modulations in pH, temperature, ionic strength, agitation, shear, and surface chemistry, during the upstream and downstream bioprocessing, resulting in insulin unfolding and subsequent fibrillation. This has fueled research in the pharmaceutical industry and academia to unveil the mechanistic insights of insulin aggregation in an attempt to devise rational strategies to regulate this unwanted phenomenon. The present review briefly describes the impacts of environmental factors of bioprocessing on the stability of insulin and correlates with various intermolecular interactions, particularly hydrophobic and electrostatic forces. The aggregation-prone regions of insulin are identified and interrelated with biophysical changes during stress conditions. The quest for novel additives, surface-active agents, and bioderived peptides in decelerating insulin aggregation, which results in overall structural stability, is described. We hope this review will help tackle the real-world challenges of insulin aggregation encountered during bioprocessing, ensuring safer, stable, and globally accessible insulin for efficient management of diabetes.

Complex role of chemical nature and tacticity in the adsorption free energy of carboxylic acid polymers at the oil-water interface: molecular dynamics simulations

Scientific understanding of the molecular structure and adsorption of polymers at oil-water liquid interfaces is very limited. In this study the adsorption free energy at the oil (CCl4)-water interface was estimated using umbrella sampling molecular dynamics simulations for six carboxylate type vinyl polymers differing in hydrophobic nature and tacticity: isotactic and syndiotactic poly(acrylic acid) (i-PAA, s-PAA), isotactic and syndiotactic poly(methacrylic acid) (i-PMA, s-PMA), and atactic and syndiotactic poly(ethylacrylic acid) (a-PEA, s-PEA). ΔGads values are in the order i-PMA < a-PEA < s-PEA < s-PAA < i-PAA < s-PMA. The results show the significant and complex influence of the chemical nature as well as tacticity of the polymer on its adsorption free energy as related to hydrogen bonding and orientation of bonds with respect to oil and water phases. The influence of tacticity is found to be the highest for PMA, which is interpreted to occur due to the balance between interactions among side groups and those occurring between side groups and solvent. Interactions between side-groups are crucial for determining the conformation of PAA (most hydrophilic) and the solvation of the side-group in water is crucial for determining the conformation of PEA (most hydrophobic). The adsorption of PMA represents the transition between these two dominating effects. The molecular contributions to the enthalpy of adsorption indicate that adsorption is favored mainly through two interactions: polymer-CCl4 and water-water.

Do Machine-Learning Atomic Descriptors and Order Parameters Tell the Same Story? The Case of Liquid Water

Machine-learning (ML) has become a key workhorse in molecular simulations. Building an ML model in this context involves encoding the information on chemical environments using local atomic descriptors. In this work, we focus on the Smooth Overlap of Atomic Positions (SOAP) and their application in studying the properties of liquid water both in the bulk and at the hydrophobic air-water interface. By using a statistical test aimed at assessing the relative information content of different distance measures defined on the same data space, we investigate if these descriptors provide the same information as some of the common order parameters that are used to characterize local water structure such as hydrogen bonding, density, or tetrahedrality to name a few. Our analysis suggests that the ML description and the standard order parameters of the local water structure are not equivalent. In particular, a combination of these order parameters probing local water environments can predict SOAP similarity only approximately, and vice versa, the environments that are similar according to SOAP are not necessarily similar according to the standard order parameters. We also elucidate the role of some of the metaparameters in the SOAP definition in encoding chemical information.

Insulin aggregation starts at dynamic triple interfaces, originating from solution agitation

The consequences of agitation on protein stability are particularly relevant to therapeutic proteins. However, the precise contribution of the different effects induced by agitation in pathways leading to protein denaturation and aggregation at interfaces is not entirely understood. In particular, the contribution of a moving triple line, induced by the sweeping of a solution meniscus on a container wall upon agitation, has only been rarely assessed. In this article, we therefore designed experimental setups to analyze how mixing, shear stress, and dynamic triple interfaces influence insulin aggregation in physiological conditions. This has been achieved by controlling agitation speed, shear stress, and the extension of triple interfaces in order to shed light on the contribution of different agitation-induced effects on insulin aggregation in physiological conditions. We demonstrate that strong agitation is necessary for the onset of insulin aggregation, while the growth of the aggregates is sustained even under weak agitation. Kinetic insulin aggregation studies in conditions of intermittent wetting show that the aggregation rate correlates with the amount of dynamic triple interfaces that the proteins are exposed to. Finally, we demonstrate that the triple line, where the protein solution, the air, and a hydrophobic surface meet constitutes a preferential early aggregation site.

Insulin Fibril Formation Caused by Mechanical Shock and Cavitation

Cavitation can occur when liquids are exposed to pressure waves of sufficient amplitude, producing rapidly expanding and collapsing gas bubbles that generate localized regions of high energy dissipation. When vials containing insulin were subjected to mechanical shock or when ultrasound was applied to the vials, the resulting cavitation events induced formation of insulin amyloid fibril nuclei that were detected by transmission electron microscopy and quantified by fluorescence spectroscopy following staining with the amyloid-sensitive dye thioflavin-T. Dropping insulin solutions in glass vials produced only minute amounts of insulin fibril nuclei, which could be detected by allowing the nuclei to grow. Cavitation-induced formation of amyloid aggregates may be relevant for iatrogenic insulin deposition disease, where insulin fibrils formed in vitro prior to administration to patients could serve as nuclei for growing fibril deposits in vivo.

Effect of the air-water interface on the conformation of amyloid beta

It has long been recognized that liquid interfaces, such as the air-water interface (AWI), can enhance the formation of protein fibrils. This makes liquid interfaces attractive templates for fibril formation but fully realizing this requires knowledge of protein behavior at interfaces, which is currently lacking. To address this, molecular dynamics simulation is used to investigate fragments of amyloid beta, a model fibril forming protein, at the air-water interface. At the air-water interface, the enrichment of aggregation-prone helical conformations provides a mechanism for the enhancement of fibrillation at interfaces. The conformational ensemble at the air-water interface was also considerably reduced compared to bulk solution due to the tendency of hydrophobic side chains partitioning into the air restricting the range of conformations. Little overlap between the conformational ensembles at the AWI and in the bulk solution was found, suggesting that AWI induces the formation of a different set of structures compared to bulk solution. The smaller Aβ(16-22) and Aβ(25-35) fragments show an increase in the propensity for an ordered secondary structure at the air-water interface but with a increased propensity for turn over other motifs, illustrating the importance of intra-protein interactions for stabilizing helical and extended conformations.

Effect of surface chemistry on islet amyloid polypeptide conformation

The formation of dense, linear arrays (fibrils) by biomolecules is the hallmark of a number of degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and type-2 diabetes. Protein fibrils have also attracted interest as building blocks for new materials. It has long been recognized that surfaces can affect the fibrillation process. Recent work on the model fibril forming protein human islet amyloid polypeptide (hIAPP) has shown that while the protein concentration is highest at hydrophobic surfaces, the rate of fibril formation is lower than on other surfaces. To understand this, replica exchange molecular dynamics simulations were used to investigate the conformations that hIAPP adopts on surfaces of different hydrophobicities. The hydrophobic surface stabilizes α-helical structures which are significantly different to those found on the hydrophilic surface and in bulk solution. There is also a greatly reduced conformational ensemble on the hydrophobic surface due to long-lived contacts between hydrophobic residues on the protein and the surface. This new microscopic information will help us determine the mechanism of the enhancement of fibril formation on surfaces and provides new insight into the effect of nanointerfaces and protein conformation.