Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) is a very powerful tool for investigating protein folding and stability because its experimental output reflects the energetics of all conformations that become minimally populated during thermal unfolding. Accordingly, analysis of DSC experiments with simple thermodynamic models has been key for developing our understanding of protein stability during the past five decades. The discovery of ultrafast folding proteins, which have naturally broad conformational ensembles and minimally cooperative unfolding, opens the possibility of probing the complete folding free energy landscape, including those conformations at the top of the barrier to folding, via DSC. Exploiting this opportunity requires high-quality experiments and the implementation of novel analytical methods based on statistical mechanics. Here, we cover the recent exciting developments in this front, describing the new analytical procedures in detail as well as providing experimental guidelines for performing such analysis. © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Athi Narayanan Naganathan

Department Of Biotechnology

article

BAYESIAN LEARNING

conformational transition

Differential scanning calorimetry

dna binding

High temperature

low temperature

Partition coefficient

PRACTICE GUIDELINE

priority journal

protein aggregation

protein analysis

protein conformation

protein degradation

protein denaturation

protein domain

Protein folding

Protein stability

PROTEIN UNFOLDING

SIGNAL NOISE RATIO

temperature dependence

Thermodynamics

Transition temperature

Bayes theorem

procedures

Calorimetry, Differential Scanning

IIT Madras is a public technical and research university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Founded in 1959, it is recognised as an Institute of National Importance.

IIT Madras has been ranked as the top engineering institute in India for four years in a row by the National Institutional Ranking Framework of the MHRD

It currently offers undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees across 16 disciplines in Engineering, Sciences, Humanities and Management. About 596 faculty belonging to science and engineering departments and centres of the Institute are engaged in teaching, research and industrial consultancy.

IIT Madras

Methods in Enzymology

Structural disorder in proteins arises from a complex interplay between weak hydrophobicity and unfavorable electrostatic interactions. The extent to which the hydrophobic effect contributes to the unique and compact native state of proteins is, however, confounded by large compensation between multiple entropic and energetic terms. Here we show that protein structural order and cooperativity arise as emergent properties upon hydrophobic substitutions in a disordered system with non-intuitive effects on folding and function. Aided by sequence-structure analysis, equilibrium, and kinetic spectroscopic studies, we engineer two hydrophobic mutations in the disordered DNA-binding domain of CytR that act synergistically, but not in isolation, to promote structure, compactness, and stability. The double mutant, with properties of a fully ordered domain, exhibits weak cooperativity with a complex and rugged conformational landscape. The mutant, however, binds cognate DNA with an affinity only marginally higher than that of the wild type, though nontrivial differences are observed in the binding to noncognate DNA. Our work provides direct experimental evidence of the dominant role of non-additive hydrophobic effects in shaping the molecular evolution of order in disordered proteins and vice versa, which could be generalized to even folded proteins with implications for protein design and functional manipulation. © 2019 American Chemical Society.

Fulltext

Biochemistry

Engineering Order and Cooperativity in a Disordered Protein

Protein modules that regulate the availability and conformational status of transcription factors determine the rapidity, duration, and magnitude of cellular response to changing conditions. One such system is the single-gene product Cnu, a four-helix bundle transcription co-repressor, which acts as a molecular thermosensor regulating the expression of virulence genes in enterobacteriaceae through modulation of its native conformational ensemble. Cnu and related genes have also been implicated in pH-dependent expression of virulence genes. We hypothesize that protonation of a conserved buried histidine (H45) in Cnu promotes large electrostatic frustration, thus disturbing the H-NS, a transcription factor, binding face. Spectroscopic and calorimetric methods reveal that H45 exhibits a suppressed pKa of ∼5.1, the protonation of which switches the conformation to an alternate native ensemble in which the fourth helix is disordered. The population redistribution can also be achieved through a mutation H45V, which does not display any switching behavior at pH values greater than 4. The Wako-Saitô-Muñoz-Eaton (WSME) statistical mechanical model predicts specific differences in the conformations and fluctuations of the fourth and first helices of Cnu determining the observed pH response. We validate these predictions through fluorescence lifetime measurements of a sole tryptophan, highlighting the presence of both native and non-native interactions in the regions adjoining the binding face of Cnu. Our combined experimental-computational study thus shows that Cnu acts both as a thermo- and pH-sensor orchestrated via a subtle but quantifiable balance between the weak packing of a structural element and protonation of a buried histidine that promotes electrostatic frustration. © 2018 American Chemical Society.

Journal of Physical Chemistry B

Switching Protein Conformational Substates by Protonation and Mutation

Thermosensing is critical for the expression of the expression of virulence genes in pathogenic bacteria that infect warm-blooded hosts. Proteins of the Hha-family, conserved among enterobacteriaceae, have been implicated in dynamically regulating the expression of a large number of genes upon temperature shifts. However, there is little mechanistic evidence at the molecular level as to how changes in temperature are transduced into structural changes and hence the functional outcome. In this study, we delineate the conformational behavior of Cnu, a putative molecular thermosensor, employing diverse spectroscopic, calorimetric and hydrodynamic measurements. We find that Cnu displays probe-dependent unfolding in equilibrium, graded increase in structural fluctuations and temperature-dependent swelling of the dimensions of its native ensemble within the physiological range of temperatures, features that are indicative of a highly malleable native ensemble. Site-specific fluorescence and NMR experiments in combination with multiple computational approaches-statistical mechanical model, coarse-grained and all-atom MD simulations-reveal that the fourth helix of Cnu acts as a unique thermosensing module displaying varying degrees of order and orientation in response to temperature modulations while undergoing a continuous unfolding transition. Our combined experimental-computational study unravels the folding-functional landscape of a natural thermosensor protein, the molecular origins of its unfolding complexity, highlights the role of functional constraints in determining folding-mechanistic behaviors, and the design principles orchestrating the signal transduction roles of the Hha protein family. © 2016 American Chemical Society.

Journal of the American Chemical Society

Graded structural polymorphism in a bacterial thermosensor Protein

Downhill folding proteins fold in microseconds by crossing a very low or no free energy barrier (&lt;3 RT), and exhibit a complex unfolding behavior in equilibrium. Such unfolding complexity is due to the weak thermodynamic coupling that exists between the various structural segments of these proteins, and it is manifested in unfolding curves that differ depending on the structural probe employed to monitor the process. Probe-dependent unfolding has important practical implications because it permits one to investigate the folding energy landscape in detail using multiprobe thermodynamic experiments. This type of thermodynamic behavior has been investigated in depth on the protein BBL, an example of extreme (one-state) downhill folding in which there is no free energy barrier at any condition, including the denaturation midpoint. However, an open question is, to what extent is such thermodynamic behavior observed on less extreme downhill folders? Here we perform a multiprobe spectroscopic characterization of the microsecond folder PDD, a structural and functional homologue of BBL that folds within the downhill regime, but is not an example of one-state downhill folding; rather at the denaturation midpoint PDD folds by crossing an incipient free energy barrier. Model-free analysis of the unfolding curves from four different spectroscopic probes together with differential scanning calorimetry reveals a dispersion of ∼9 K in the apparent melting temperature and also marked differences in unfolding broadness (from ∼50 to ∼130 kJ mol-1 when analyzed with a two-state model), confirming that such properties are also observed on less extreme downhill folders. We subsequently perform a global quantitative analysis of the unfolding data of PDD using the same ME statistical mechanical model that was used before for the BBL domain. The analysis shows that this simple model captures all of the features observed on the unfolding of PDD (i.e., the intensity and temperature dependence of the different spectroscopic signals). From the model we estimate a free energy landscape for PDD in which the maximal thermodynamic barrier (i.e., at the denaturation midpoint) is only ∼0.5 RT, consistent with previous independent estimates. Our results highlight that multiprobe unfolding experiments in equilibrium combined with statistical mechanical modeling provide important insights into the structural events that take place during the unfolding process of downhill proteins, and thus effectively probe the free energy landscape of these proteins. © 2014 American Chemical Society.

Thermodynamics of downhill folding: Multi-probe analysis of pdd, a protein that folds over a marginal free energy barrier

Charged residues on the surface of a protein are known hot-spots for post-translational modification, protein/ligand-binding, and tuning conformational stabilities. Recent experimental evidence points to the fact that surface electrostatics can also modulate thermodynamic barriers and hence folding mechanisms. To probe for this behavior across different proteins, we develop a novel version of the Wako-Saitô-Muñoz-Eaton (WSME) model in which we include an electrostatic potential term in the energy function while simplifying the treatment of solvation free energy. Both of the energy terms are obtained by quantitatively fitting the model to differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) experiments that carry critical information on the protein partition function. We characterize four sets of structural/functional homologues (HEWL/BLA, CspB, engrailed, α-spectrin) either by fitting the experimental data of a single domain in the homologous set and predicting the conformational behavior of the rest with the same set of parameters or by performing semiblind predictions. The model with the added electrostatic term is able to successfully reproduce the order of thermodynamic stabilities and relaxation rates of most of the homologues. In parallel, we predict diverse conformational features including a wide range of thermodynamic barriers (∼9-40 kJ/mol), broad native ensembles in helical proteins, structured unfolded states and intermediates, rugged folding landscapes, and further provide an independent protein-specific estimate of the folding speed limit at 298 K (1/(7-300 μs)). Our results are evidence that protein surface electrostatics can be tailored to not only engineer stabilities but also folding mechanisms and the ruggedness of the underlying landscape. © 2012 American Chemical Society.

Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation

Predictions from an ising-like statistical mechanical model on the dynamic and thermodynamic effects of protein surface electrostatics

Interaction Networks in Protein Folding via Atomic-Resolution Experiments and Long-Time-Scale Molecular Dynamics Simulations

Molecular Biology and Evolution

Mutational Studies on Resurrected Ancestral Proteins Reveal Conservation of Site-Specific Amino Acid Preferences throughout Evolutionary History

Evolution of Conformational Dynamics Determines the Conversion of a Promiscuous Generalist into a Specialist Enzyme

Modern Analysis of Protein Folding by Differential Scanning Calorimetry

Journal	Methods in Enzymology
Publisher	Academic Press Inc.
ISSN	00766879
Open Access	No