Dataset Information

Slipknotting upon native-like loop formation in a trefoil knot protein.

ABSTRACT: Protein knots and slipknots, mostly regarded as intriguing oddities, are gradually being recognized as significant structural motifs. Recent experimental results show that knotting, starting from a fully extended polypeptide, has not yet been observed. Understanding the nucleation process of folding knots is thus a natural challenge for both experimental and theoretical investigation. In this study, we employ energy landscape theory and molecular dynamics to elucidate the entire folding mechanism. The full free energy landscape of a knotted protein is mapped using an all-atom structure-based protein model. Results show that, due to the topological constraint, the protein folds through a three-state mechanism that contains (i) a precise nucleation site that creates a correctly twisted native loop (first barrier) and (ii) a rate-limiting free energy barrier that is traversed by two parallel knot-forming routes. The main route corresponds to a slipknot conformation, a collapsed configuration where the C-terminal helix adopts a hairpin-like configuration while threading, and the minor route to an entropically limited plug motion, where the extended terminus is threaded as through a needle. Knot formation is a late transition state process and results show that random (nonspecific) knots are a very rare and unstable set of configurations both at and below folding temperature. Our study shows that a native-biased landscape is sufficient to fold complex topologies and presents a folding mechanism generalizable to all known knotted protein topologies: knotting via threading a native-like loop in a preordered intermediate.

SUBMITTER: Noel JK

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2932594 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Slipknotting upon native-like loop formation in a trefoil knot protein.

Noel Jeffrey K JK Sułkowska Joanna I JI Onuchic José N JN

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20100811 35

Protein knots and slipknots, mostly regarded as intriguing oddities, are gradually being recognized as significant structural motifs. Recent experimental results show that knotting, starting from a fully extended polypeptide, has not yet been observed. Understanding the nucleation process of folding knots is thus a natural challenge for both experimental and theoretical investigation. In this study, we employ energy landscape theory and molecular dynamics to elucidate the entire folding mechanis ...[more]

PMID: 20702769

Similar Datasets

Project description:Unlike the core structural elements of a protein like regular secondary structure, template based modeling (TBM) has difficulty with loop regions due to their variability in sequence and structure as well as the sparse sampling from a limited number of homologous templates. We present a novel, knowledge-based method for loop sampling that leverages homologous torsion angle information to estimate a continuous joint backbone dihedral angle density at each loop position. The φ,ψ distributions are estimated via a Dirichlet process mixture of hidden Markov models (DPM-HMM). Models are quickly generated based on samples from these distributions and were enriched using an end-to-end distance filter. The performance of the DPM-HMM method was evaluated against a diverse test set in a leave-one-out approach. Candidates as low as 0.45 Å RMSD and with a worst case of 3.66 Å were produced. For the canonical loops like the immunoglobulin complementarity-determining regions (mean RMSD <2.0 Å), the DPM-HMM method performs as well or better than the best templates, demonstrating that our automated method recaptures these canonical loops without inclusion of any IgG specific terms or manual intervention. In cases with poor or few good templates (mean RMSD >7.0 Å), this sampling method produces a population of loop structures to around 3.66 Å for loops up to 17 residues. In a direct test of sampling to the Loopy algorithm, our method demonstrates the ability to sample nearer native structures for both the canonical CDRH1 and non-canonical CDRH3 loops. Lastly, in the realistic test conditions of the CASP9 experiment, successful application of DPM-HMM for 90 loops from 45 TBM targets shows the general applicability of our sampling method in loop modeling problem. These results demonstrate that our DPM-HMM produces an advantage by consistently sampling near native loop structure. The software used in this analysis is available for download at http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~dahl/software/cortorgles/.

Dataset Information

Slipknotting upon native-like loop formation in a trefoil knot protein.

Publications

Slipknotting upon native-like loop formation in a trefoil knot protein.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets