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Conformational disorder of proteins assessed by real-space molecular dynamics refinement.

ABSTRACT: Motion is critical to the function of many proteins, but much more difficult to study than structure. Due to lack of easy alternatives, although there are inherent limitations, there have been several prior attempts to extract some information from the Bragg scattering in conventional diffraction patterns. Bragg diffraction reflects only a small proportion of a protein's motion and disorder, so fitted values likely underestimate reality. However, this work shows that the fitted estimates should be even smaller, because current methods of refinement over-fit the Bragg diffraction, leading to a component of the disorder that is not based on any experimental data, and could be characterized as a guess. Real-space refinement is less susceptible than other methods, but its application depends on the availability of very accurate experimental phases. A future challenge will be the collection of such data without resort to cryo-techniques, so that a physiologically relevant understanding can be achieved.

SUBMITTER: Chen Z

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1301337 | biostudies-other | 2001 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Conformational disorder of proteins assessed by real-space molecular dynamics refinement.

Chen Z Z Chapman M S MS

Biophysical journal 20010301 3

Motion is critical to the function of many proteins, but much more difficult to study than structure. Due to lack of easy alternatives, although there are inherent limitations, there have been several prior attempts to extract some information from the Bragg scattering in conventional diffraction patterns. Bragg diffraction reflects only a small proportion of a protein's motion and disorder, so fitted values likely underestimate reality. However, this work shows that the fitted estimates should ...[more]

PMID: 11222306

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Project description:The knowledge of multiple conformational states is a prerequisite to understand the function of membrane transport proteins. Unfortunately, the determination of detailed atomic structures for all these functionally important conformational states with conventional high-resolution approaches is often difficult and unsuccessful. In some cases, biophysical and biochemical approaches can provide important complementary structural information that can be exploited with the help of advanced computational methods to derive structural models of specific conformational states. In particular, functional and spectroscopic measurements in combination with site-directed mutations constitute one important source of information to obtain these mixed-resolution structural models. A very common problem with this strategy, however, is the difficulty to simultaneously integrate all the information from multiple independent experiments involving different mutations or chemical labels to derive a unique structural model consistent with the data. To resolve this issue, a novel restrained molecular dynamics structural refinement method is developed to simultaneously incorporate multiple experimentally determined constraints (e.g., engineered metal bridges or spin-labels), each treated as an individual molecular fragment with all atomic details. The internal structure of each of the molecular fragments is treated realistically, while there is no interaction between different molecular fragments to avoid unphysical steric clashes. The information from all the molecular fragments is exploited simultaneously to constrain the backbone to refine a three-dimensional model of the conformational state of the protein. The method is illustrated by refining the structure of the voltage-sensing domain (VSD) of the Kv1.2 potassium channel in the resting state and by exploring the distance histograms between spin-labels attached to T4 lysozyme. The resulting VSD structures are in good agreement with the consensus model of the resting state VSD and the spin-spin distance histograms from ESR/DEER experiments on T4 lysozyme are accurately reproduced.

Dataset Information

Conformational disorder of proteins assessed by real-space molecular dynamics refinement.

Publications

Conformational disorder of proteins assessed by real-space molecular dynamics refinement.

Similar Datasets

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