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ABSTRACT: Introduction
Protein thermostability is an important field for its evolutionary perspective of mesophilic versus thermophilic relationship and for its industrial/ therapeutic applications.Methods
Presently, a total 400 (200 thermophilic and 200 mesophilic homologue) proteins were studied utilizing several software/databases to evaluate their amino acid preferences. Randomly selected 50 homologous proteins with available PDB-structure of each group were explored for the understanding of the protein charges, isoelectric-points, hydrophilicity, hydrophobicity, tyrosine phosphorylation and salt-bridge occurrences. These 100 proteins were further probed to generate Ramachandran plot/data for the gross secondary structure prediction in and comparison between the thermophilic and mesophilic proteins.Results
Present results strongly suggest that nonpolar smaller volume amino acids Ala (?2 = 238.54, p<0.001) and Gly (?2 = 73.35, p<0.001) are highly and Val moderately (?2 = 144.43, p<0.001) occurring in the 85% of thermophilic proteins. Phospho-regulated Tyr and redox-sensitive Cys are also moderately distributed (?2~20.0, p<0.01) in a larger number of thermophilic proteins. A consistent lower distribution of thermophilicity and discretely higher distribution of hydrophobicity is noticed in a large number of thermophilic versus their mesophilic protein homolog. The mean differences of isoelectric points and charges are found to be significantly less (7.11 vs. 6.39, p<0.05 and 1 vs. -0.6, p<0.01, respectively) in thermophilic proteins compared to their mesophilic counterpart. The possible sites for Tyr phosphorylation are noticed to be 25% higher (p<0.05) in thermophilic proteins. The 60% thermophiles are found with higher number of salt bridges in this study. The average percentage of salt-bridge of thermophiles is found to be higher by 20% than their mesophilic homologue. The GLU-HIS and GLU-LYS salt-bridge dyads are calculated to be significantly higher (p<0.05 and p<0.001, respectively) in thermophilic and GLU-ARG is higher in the mesophilic proteins. The Ramachandran plot/ data suggest a higher abundance of the helix, left-handed helix, sheet, nonplanar peptide and lower occurrence of cis peptide, loop/ turn and outlier in thermophiles. Pearson's correlation result suggests that the isoelectric points of mesophilic and thermophilic proteins are positively correlated (r = 0.93 and 0.84, respectively; p<0.001) to their corresponding charges. And their hydrophilicity is negatively associated with the corresponding hydrophobicity (r = -0.493, p<0.001 and r = -0.324, p<0.05) suggesting their reciprocal evolvement.Conclusions
Present results for the first time with this large amount of datasets and multiple contributing factors suggest the greater occurrence of hydrophobicity, salt-bridges and smaller volume nonpolar residues (Gly, Ala and Val) and lesser occurrence of bulky polar residues in the thermophilic proteins. A more stoichiometric relationship amongst these factors minimized the hindrance due to side chain burial and increased compactness and secondary structural stability in thermophilic proteins.
SUBMITTER: Panja AS
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4503463 | biostudies-literature | 2015
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
PloS one 20150715 7
<h4>Introduction</h4>Protein thermostability is an important field for its evolutionary perspective of mesophilic versus thermophilic relationship and for its industrial/ therapeutic applications.<h4>Methods</h4>Presently, a total 400 (200 thermophilic and 200 mesophilic homologue) proteins were studied utilizing several software/databases to evaluate their amino acid preferences. Randomly selected 50 homologous proteins with available PDB-structure of each group were explored for the understand ...[more]