Biopharmaceuticals R & D, AstraZeneca, Granta Park, Cambridge CB21 6GP, U.K.
Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology & School of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, U.K.
J Am Soc Mass Spectrom. 2021 Jul 7;32(7):1583-1592. doi: 10.1021/jasms.0c00438. Epub 2021 Feb 15.
NMR studies and X-ray crystallography have shown that the structures of the 99-residue amyloidogenic protein β-microglobulin (βm) and its more aggregation-prone variant, D76N, are indistinguishable, and hence, the reason for the striking difference in their aggregation propensities remains elusive. Here, we have employed two protein footprinting methods, hydrogen-deuterium exchange (HDX) and fast photochemical oxidation of proteins (FPOP), in conjunction with ion mobility-mass spectrometry, to probe the differences in conformational dynamics of the two proteins. Using HDX-MS, a clear difference in HDX protection is observed between these two proteins in the E-F loop (residues 70-77) which contains the D76N substitution, with a significantly higher deuterium uptake being observed in the variant protein. Conversely, following FPOP-MS only minimal differences in the level of oxidation between the two proteins are observed in the E-F loop region, suggesting only modest side-chain movements in that area. Together the HDX-MS and FPOP-MS data suggest that a tangible perturbation to the hydrogen-bonding network in the E-F loop has taken place in the D76N variant and furthermore illustrate the benefit of using multiple complementary footprinting methods to address subtle, but possibly biologically important, differences between highly similar proteins.
NMR 研究和 X 射线晶体学表明,具有 99 个残基的淀粉样蛋白β-微球蛋白(βm)及其更易聚集的变体 D76N 的结构无法区分,因此,其聚集倾向的惊人差异的原因仍然难以捉摸。在这里,我们使用了两种蛋白质足迹探测方法,氢氘交换(HDX)和蛋白质快速光化学氧化(FPOP),结合离子淌度质谱,来探测这两种蛋白质构象动力学的差异。使用 HDX-MS,在包含 D76N 取代的 E-F 环(残基 70-77)中,这两种蛋白质的 HDX 保护存在明显差异,变体蛋白中观察到的氘摄取量明显更高。相反,在 FPOP-MS 之后,在 E-F 环区域,两种蛋白质之间的氧化水平仅观察到最小的差异,表明该区域的侧链运动幅度很小。HDX-MS 和 FPOP-MS 数据共同表明,D76N 变体中 E-F 环氢键网络发生了明显的扰动,此外还说明了使用多种互补足迹探测方法来解决高度相似的蛋白质之间细微但可能具有生物学意义的差异的好处。