Identifying hydrophobic protein patches to inform protein interaction interfaces.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Rego NB
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8018078 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:Rad23 proteins are involved both in the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway and in nucleotide excision repair (NER), but the relationship between these two pathways is not yet understood. The two human homologs of Rad23, hHR23A and B, are functionally redundant in NER and interact with xeroderma pigmentosum complementation group C (XPC) protein. The XPC-hHR23 complex is responsible for the specific recognition of damaged DNA, which is an early step in NER. The interaction of the XPC binding domain (XPCB) of hHR23A/B with XPC protein has been shown to be important for its optimal function in NER. We have determined the solution structure of XPCB of hHR23A. The domain consists of five amphipathic helices and reveals hydrophobic patches on the otherwise highly hydrophilic domain surface. The patches are predicted to be involved in interaction with XPC. The XPCB domain has limited sequence homology with any proteins outside of the Rad23 family except for sacsin, a protein involved in spastic ataxia of Charlevoix-Saguenay, which contains a domain with 35% sequence identity.
| S-EPMC2280024 | biostudies-literature
Project description:De novo protein design requires the identification of amino-acid sequences that favor the target-folded conformation and are soluble in water. One strategy for promoting solubility is to disallow hydrophobic residues on the protein surface during design. However, naturally occurring proteins often have hydrophobic amino acids on their surface that contribute to protein stability via the partial burial of hydrophobic surface area or play a key role in the formation of protein-protein interactions. A less restrictive approach for surface design that is used by the modeling program Rosetta is to parameterize the energy function so that the number of hydrophobic amino acids designed on the protein surface is similar to what is observed in naturally occurring monomeric proteins. Previous studies with Rosetta have shown that this limits surface hydrophobics to the naturally occurring frequency (?28%), but that it does not prevent the formation of hydrophobic patches that are considerably larger than those observed in naturally occurring proteins. Here, we describe a new score term that explicitly detects and penalizes the formation of hydrophobic patches during computational protein design. With the new term, we are able to design protein surfaces that include hydrophobic amino acids at naturally occurring frequencies, but do not have large hydrophobic patches. By adjusting the strength of the new score term, the emphasis of surface redesigns can be switched between maintaining solubility and maximizing folding free energy.
| S-EPMC3277657 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Hetero dimer (different monomers) interfaces are involved in catalysis and regulation through the formation of interface active sites. This is critical in cell and molecular biology events. The physical and chemical factors determining the formation of the interface active sites is often large in numbers. The combined role of interacting features is frequently combinatorial and additive in nature. Therefore, it is important to determine the physical and chemical features of such interactions. A number of such features have been documented in literature since 1975. However, the use of such interaction features in the prediction of interaction partners and sites given their sequences is still a challenge. In a non-redundant dataset of 156 hetero-dimer structures determined by X-ray crystallography, the interacting partners are often varying in size and thus, size variation between subunits is an important factor in determining the mode of interface formation. The size of protein subunits interacting are either small-small, largelarge, medium-medium, large-small, large-medium and small-medium. It should also be noted that the interface formed between subunits have physical interactions at N terminal (N), C terminal (C) and middle (M) region of the protein with reference to their sequences in one dimension. These features are believed to have application in the prediction of interaction partners and sites from sequences. However, the use of such features for interaction prediction from sequence is not currently clear.
| S-EPMC2957768 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Identifying binding hot spots in protein-protein interfaces is important for understanding the binding specificity and for the design of nonpeptide, small molecule inhibitors. Molecular dynamics simulation in the isopropanol/water cosolvent environment and in water was employed to investigate Bcl-xL protein, which has a highly flexible, large, and primarily hydrophobic binding site. Simulations of either the apo- or holocrystal structures of the Bcl-xL in pure water fail to generate conformations found in the cocrystal structures of Bcl-xL in complex with its binding partners due to hydrophobic collapse. In contrast, simulations in cosolvent starting either from the apo- or holocrystal structure of the Bcl-xL yield binding-site conformations similar to that found in the cocrystal structures of Bcl-xL. Hydrophobic binding hot spots identified using the conformations from the cosolvent simulations are in excellent agreement with experimental structural data of known inhibitors. Importantly, cosolvent simulations revealed the highly dynamic nature of the hydrophobic binding pockets in Bcl-xL and yielded new structural insights for the design of novel Bcl-xL small-molecule inhibitors.
| S-EPMC4018050 | biostudies-literature
Project description:There is a great interest in understanding and exploiting protein-protein associations as new routes for treating human disease. However, these associations are difficult to structurally characterize or model although the number of X-ray structures for protein-protein complexes is expanding. One feature of these complexes that has received little attention is the role of water molecules in the interfacial region.A data set of 4741 water molecules abstracted from 179 high-resolution (? 2.30 Å) X-ray crystal structures of protein-protein complexes was analyzed with a suite of modeling tools based on the HINT forcefield and hydrogen-bonding geometry. A metric termed Relevance was used to classify the general roles of the water molecules.The water molecules were found to be involved in: a) (bridging) interactions with both proteins (21%), b) favorable interactions with only one protein (53%), and c) no interactions with either protein (26%). This trend is shown to be independent of the crystallographic resolution. Interactions with residue backbones are consistent for all classes and account for 21.5% of all interactions. Interactions with polar residues are significantly more common for the first group and interactions with non-polar residues dominate the last group. Waters interacting with both proteins stabilize on average the proteins' interaction (-0.46 kcal mol(-1)), but the overall average contribution of a single water to the protein-protein interaction energy is unfavorable (+0.03 kcal mol(-1)). Analysis of the waters without favorable interactions with either protein suggests that this is a conserved phenomenon: 42% of these waters have SASA ? 10 Å(2) and are thus largely buried, and 69% of these are within predominantly hydrophobic environments or "hydrophobic bubbles". Such water molecules may have an important biological purpose in mediating protein-protein interactions.
| S-EPMC3178540 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Interactions between proteins play a key role in many cellular processes. Studying protein-protein interactions that share similar interaction interfaces may shed light on their evolution and could be helpful in elucidating the mechanisms behind stability and dynamics of the protein complexes. When two complexes share structurally similar subunits, the similarity of the interaction interfaces can be found through a structural superposition of the subunits. However, an accurate detection of similarity between the protein complexes containing subunits of unrelated structure remains an open problem. Here, we present an alignment-free machine learning approach to measure interface similarity. The approach relies on the feature-based representation of protein interfaces and does not depend on the superposition of the interacting subunit pairs. Specifically, we develop an SVM classifier of similar and dissimilar interfaces and derive a feature-based interface similarity measure. Next, the similarity measure is applied to a set of 2,806×2,806 binary complex pairs to build a hierarchical classification of protein-protein interactions. Finally, we explore case studies of similar interfaces from each level of the hierarchy, considering cases when the subunits forming interactions are either homologous or structurally unrelated. The analysis has suggested that the positions of charged residues in the homologous interfaces are not necessarily conserved and may exhibit more complex conservation patterns.
| S-EPMC3093400 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Most proteins attain their biological functions through specific interactions with other proteins. Thus, the study of protein-protein interactions and the interfaces that mediate these interactions is of prime importance for the understanding of biological function. In particular the precise determinants of binding specificity and their contributions to binding energy within protein interfaces are not well understood. In order to better understand these determinants an appropriate description of the interaction surface is needed. Available data from the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae allow us to focus on a single species and to use all the available structures, correcting for redundancy, instead of using structural representatives. This allows us to control for potentially confounding factors that may affect sequence propensities. We find a significant contribution of main-chain atoms to protein-protein interactions. These include interactions both with other main-chain and side-chain atoms on the interacting chain. We find that the type of interaction depends on both amino acid and secondary structure type involved in the contact. For example, residues in ?-helices and large amino acids are the most likely to be involved in interactions through their side-chain atoms. We find an intriguing homogeneity when calculating the average solvation energy of different areas of the protein surface. Unexpectedly, homo- and hetero-complexes have quite similar results for all analyses. Our findings demonstrate that the manner in which protein-protein interactions are formed is determined by the residue type and the secondary structure found in the interface. However the homogeneity of the desolvation energy despite heterogeneity of interface properties suggests a complex relationship between interface composition and binding energy.
| S-EPMC3124478 | biostudies-literature
Project description:To date, the COVID-19 pandemic has claimed over 1 million human lives, infected another 50 million individuals and wreaked havoc on the global economy. The crisis has spurred the ongoing development of drugs targeting its etiological agent, the SARS-CoV-2. Targeting relevant protein-protein interaction interfaces (PPIIs) is a viable paradigm for the design of antiviral drugs and enriches the targetable chemical space by providing alternative targets for drug discovery. In this review, we will provide a comprehensive overview of the theory, methods and applications of PPII-targeted drug development towards COVID-19 based on recent literature. We will also highlight novel developments, such as the successful use of non-native protein-protein interactions as targets for antiviral drug screening. We hope that this review may serve as an entry point for those interested in applying PPIIs towards COVID-19 drug discovery and speed up drug development against the pandemic.
| S-EPMC8064971 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Structural genomics initiatives aim to elucidate representative 3D structures for the majority of protein families over the next decade, but many obstacles must be overcome. The correct design of constructs is extremely important since many proteins will be too large or contain unstructured regions and will not be amenable to crystallization. It is therefore essential to identify regions in protein sequences that are likely to be suitable for structural study. Scooby-Domain is a fast and simple method to identify globular domains in protein sequences. Domains are compact units of protein structure and their correct delineation will aid structural elucidation through a divide-and-conquer approach. Scooby-Domain predictions are based on the observed lengths and hydrophobicities of domains from proteins with known tertiary structure. The prediction method employs an A*-search to identify sequence regions that form a globular structure and those that are unstructured. On a test set of 173 proteins with consensus CATH and SCOP domain definitions, Scooby-Domain has a sensitivity of 50% and an accuracy of 29%, which is better than current state-of-the-art methods. The method does not rely on homology searches and, therefore, can identify previously unknown domains.
| S-EPMC2241846 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Structural and colloidal stability of proteins at different surfaces and interfaces is of great importance in many fields including medical, pharmaceutical, or material science. Due to their flexibility, proteins tend to respond to their environmental conditions and can undergo structural and conformational changes. For instance, alterations in physiological factors such as temperature, ions concentration, or pH as well as the adsorption to an interface can initiate protein aggregation. Therefore, at different surfaces and interfaces the characterization of the structural and colloidal stability of proteins, which is mainly influenced by their electrostatic and hydrophobic interactions, is of fundamental importance. In this study, we utilized sum frequency generation (SFG) spectroscopy to assess the role of solution pH on the polarity and magnitude of the electric field within the hydration shell of selected model proteins adsorbed to a hydrophobic surface. We used polystyrene (PS) as a model hydrophobic surface and determined the isoelectric point (IEP) of four structurally different model proteins. Comparing the measured IEP of proteins at the PS/solution or air/solution interface with that determined in the bulk solution via zeta potential measurement, we found significant similarities between the IEP of surface adsorbed proteins and those in the bulk aqueous phase. The pH dependence behavior of proteins was correlated to their amino acid composition and degree of hydrophobicity.
| S-EPMC8360839 | biostudies-literature