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Register a new userWater Contribution to the Protein Folding and its Relevance in Protein Design and Protein Aggregation
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Water plays a fundamental role in protein stability. However, the effect of the properties of water on the behaviour of proteins is only partially understood. Several theories have been proposed to give insight into the mechanisms of cold and pressure denaturation, or the limits of temperature and pressure above which no protein has a stable, functional state, or how unfolding and aggregation are related. Here we review our results based on a theoretical approach that can rationalise the water contribution to protein solutions free energy. We show, using Monte Carlo simulations, how we can rationalise experimental data with our recent results. We discuss how our findings can help develop new strategies for the design of novel synthetic biopolymers or possible approaches for mitigating neurodegenerative pathologies.
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The problem of the helix-coil transition of biopolymers in explicit solvents, like water, with the ability for hydrogen bonding with solvent is addressed analytically using a suitably modified version of the Generalized Model of Polypeptide Chains. Besides the regular helix-coil transition, an additional coil-helix or reentrant transition is also found at lower temperatures. The reentrant transition arises due to competition between polymer-polymer and polymer-water hydrogen bonds. The balance between the two types of hydrogen bonding can be shifted to either direction through changes not only in temperature, but also by pressure, mechanical force, osmotic stress or other external influences. Both polypeptides and polynucleotides are considered within a unified formalism. Our approach provides an explanation of the experimental difficulty of observing the reentrant transition with pressure; and underscores the advantage of pulling experiments for studies of DNA. Results are discussed and compared with those reported in a number of recent publications with which a significant level of agreement is obtained.
Inspired by recent experimental observation of patterning at the membrane of a living cell, we propose a generic model for the dynamics of a fluctuating interface driven by particle-like inclusions which stimulate its growth. We find that the coupling between interfacial and inclusions dynam- ics yields microphase separation and the self-organisation of travelling waves. These patterns are strikingly similar to those detected in the aforementioned experiments on actin-protein systems. Our results further show that the active growth kinetics does not fall into the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class for growing interfaces, displaying instead a novel superposition of equilibrium-like scaling and sustained oscillations.
We argue that the first order folding transitions of proteins observed at physiological chemical conditions end in a critical point for a given temperature and chemical potential of the surrounding water. We investigate this critical point using a hierarchical Hamiltonian and determine its universality class. This class differs qualitatively from those of other known models.
The energy for protein folding arises from multiple sources and is not large in total. In spite of the many specific successes of energy landscape and other approaches, there still seems to be some missing guiding factor that explains how energy from diverse small sources can drive a complex molecule to a unique state. We explore the possibility that the missing factor is in the geometry. A comparison of folding with other physical phenomena, together with analytic modeling of a molecule, led us to analyze the physics of optical caustic formation and of folding behavior side-by-side. The physics of folding and caustics is ostensibly very different but there are several strong parallels. This comparison emphasizes the mathematical similarity and also identifies differences. Since the 1970s, the physics of optical caustics has been developed to a very high degree of mathematical sophistication using catastrophe theory. That kind of quantitative application of catastrophe theory has not previously been applied to folding nor have the points of similarity with optics been identified or exploited. A putative underlying physical link between caustics and folding is a torsion wave of non-constant wave speed, propagating on the dihedral angles and $Psi$ found in an analytical model of the molecule. Regardless of whether we have correctly identified an underlying link, the analogy between caustic formation and folding is strong and the parallels (and differences) in the physics are useful.
We present a computational study on the folding and aggregation of proteins in aqueous environment, as function of its concentration. We show how the increase of the concentration of individual protein species can induce a partial unfolding of the native conformation without the occurrence of aggregates. A further increment of the protein concentration results in the complete loss of the folded structures and induces the formation of protein aggregates. We discuss the effect of the protein interface on the water fluctuations in the protein hydration shell and their relevance in the protein-protein interaction.
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