Department of Biotechnology, Bhupat & Jyoti Mehta School of Biosciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai 600036, India.
Institute of Multidisciplinary Research for Advanced Materials, Tohoku University, Katahira 2-1-1, Aoba-ku, Sendai 980-8577, Japan.
J Phys Chem Lett. 2022 Apr 7;13(13):3112-3120. doi: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.2c00316. Epub 2022 Mar 31.
We investigate the conformational properties of the intrinsically disordered DNA-binding domain of CytR in the presence of the polymeric crowder polyethylene glycol (PEG). Integrating circular dichroism, nuclear magnetic resonance, and single-molecule Förster resonance energy transfer measurements, we demonstrate that disordered CytR populates a well-folded minor conformation in its native ensemble, while the unfolded ensemble collapses and folds with an increase in crowder density independent of the crowder size. Employing a statistical-mechanical model, the effective reduction in the accessible conformational space of a residue in the unfolded state is estimated to be 10% at 300 mg/mL PEG8000, relative to dilute conditions. The experimentally consistent PEG-temperature phase diagram thus constructed reveals that entropic effects can stabilize disordered CytR by 10 kJ mol, driving the equilibrium toward folded conformations under physiological conditions. Our work highlights the malleable conformational landscape of CytR, the presence of a folded conformation in the disordered ensemble, and proposes a scaling relation for quantifying excluded volume effects on protein stability.
我们研究了在聚合性胶态分子聚乙二醇(PEG)存在下 CytR 的无规则 DNA 结合域的构象性质。通过整合圆二色性、核磁共振和单分子荧光共振能量转移测量,我们证明无序 CytR 在其天然状态下存在一个折叠良好的次要构象,而在胶态分子浓度增加时,无序状态的构象会崩溃并折叠,而与胶态分子大小无关。利用统计力学模型,我们估计在 300mg/mlPEG8000 时,与稀溶液条件相比,无规则状态下一个残基的可及构象空间的有效减少量为 10%。由此构建的实验一致的 PEG-温度相图表明,熵效应可以使无序 CytR 稳定 10kJ/mol,从而在生理条件下使平衡向折叠构象移动。我们的工作突出了 CytR 可塑的构象景观、无序状态下存在折叠构象,以及提出了一种用于量化蛋白质稳定性的排斥体积效应的标度关系。