Dinner A R, Lazaridis T, Karplus M
Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, 12 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1999 Aug 3;96(16):9068-73. doi: 10.1073/pnas.96.16.9068.
The kinetics of formation of protein structural motifs (e.g., alpha-helices and beta-hairpins) can provide information about the early events in protein folding. A recent study has used fluorescence measurements to monitor the folding thermodynamics and kinetics of a 16-residue beta-hairpin. In the present paper, we obtain the free energy surface and conformations involved in the folding of an atomistic model for the beta-hairpin from multicanonical Monte Carlo simulations. The results suggest that folding proceeds by a collapse that is downhill in free energy, followed by rearrangement to form a structure with part of the hydrophobic cluster; the hairpin hydrogen bonds propagate outwards in both directions from the partial cluster. Such a folding mechanism differs from the published interpretation of the experimental results, which is based on a helix-coil-type phenomenological model.
蛋白质结构基序(如α-螺旋和β-发夹)的形成动力学可以提供有关蛋白质折叠早期事件的信息。最近的一项研究使用荧光测量来监测一个16残基β-发夹的折叠热力学和动力学。在本文中,我们通过多正则蒙特卡罗模拟获得了β-发夹原子模型折叠过程中涉及的自由能面和构象。结果表明,折叠过程通过自由能下降的塌缩进行,随后重排形成具有部分疏水簇的结构;发夹氢键从部分簇向两个方向向外传播。这种折叠机制与基于螺旋-卷曲型唯象模型对实验结果的已发表解释不同。