A finely balanced order-disorder equilibrium sculpts the folding-binding landscape of an antibiotic sequestering protein.

TipA, a MerR family transcription factor from Streptomyces lividans, promotes antibiotic resistance by sequestering broad-spectrum thiopeptide-based antibiotics, thus counteracting their inhibitory effect on ribosomes. TipAS, a minimal binding motif which is expressed as an isoform of TipA, harbors a partially disordered N-terminal subdomain that folds upon binding multiple antibiotics. The extent and nature of the underlying molecular heterogeneity in TipAS that shapes its promiscuous folding-function landscape is an open question and is critical for understanding antibiotic-sequestration mechanisms. Here, combining equilibrium and time-resolved experiments, statistical modeling, and simulations, we show that the TipAS native ensemble exhibits a pre-equilibrium between binding-incompetent and binding-competent substates, with the fully folded state appearing only as an excited state under physiological conditions. The binding-competent state characterized by a partially structured N-terminal subdomain loses structure progressively in the physiological range of temperatures, swells on temperature increase, and displays slow conformational exchange across multiple conformations. Binding to the bactericidal antibiotic thiostrepton follows a combination of induced-fit and conformational-selection-like mechanisms, via partial binding and concomitant stabilization of the binding-competent substate. These ensemble features are evolutionarily conserved across orthologs from select bacteria that infect humans, underscoring the functional role of partial disorder in the native ensemble of antibiotic-sequestering proteins belonging to the MerR family.

Molecular and thermodynamic determinants of self-assembly and hetero-oligomerization in the enterobacterial thermo-osmo-regulatory protein H-NS.

Environmentally regulated gene expression is critical for bacterial survival under stress conditions, including extremes in temperature, osmolarity and nutrient availability. Here, we dissect the thermo- and osmo-responsory behavior of the transcriptional repressor H-NS, an archetypal nucleoid-condensing sensory protein, ubiquitous in enterobacteria that infect the mammalian gut. Through experiments and thermodynamic modeling, we show that H-NS exhibits osmolarity, temperature and concentration dependent self-association, with a highly polydisperse native ensemble dominated by monomers, dimers, tetramers and octamers. The relative population of these oligomeric states is determined by an interplay between dimerization and higher-order oligomerization, which in turn drives a competition between weak homo- versus hetero-oligomerization of protein-protein and protein-DNA complexes. A phosphomimetic mutation, Y61E, fully eliminates higher-order self-assembly and preserves only dimerization while weakening DNA binding, highlighting that oligomerization is a prerequisite for strong DNA binding. We further demonstrate the presence of long-distance thermodynamic connectivity between dimerization and oligomerization sites on H-NS which influences the binding of the co-repressor Cnu, and switches the DNA binding mode of the hetero-oligomeric H-NS:Cnu complex. Our work thus uncovers important organizational principles in H-NS including a multi-layered thermodynamic control, and provides a molecular framework broadly applicable to other thermo-osmo sensory proteins that employ similar mechanisms to regulate gene expression.

Probing excited state 1Hα chemical shifts in intrinsically disordered proteins with a triple resonance-based CEST experiment: Application to a disorder-to-order switch.

Over 40% of eukaryotic proteomes and 15% of bacterial proteomes are predicted to be intrinsically disordered based on their amino acid sequence. Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) exist as heterogeneous ensembles of interconverting conformations and pose a challenge to the structure-function paradigm by apparently functioning without possessing stable structural elements. IDPs play a prominent role in biological processes involving extensive intermolecular interaction networks and their inherently dynamic nature facilitates their promiscuous interaction with multiple structurally diverse partner molecules. NMR spectroscopy has made pivotal contributions to our understanding of IDPs because of its unique ability to characterize heterogeneity at atomic resolution. NMR methods such as Chemical Exchange Saturation Transfer (CEST) and relaxation dispersion have enabled the detection of 'invisible' excited states in biomolecules which are transiently and sparsely populated, yet central for function. Here, we develop a 1Hα CEST pulse sequence which overcomes the resonance overlap problem in the 1Hα-13Cα plane of IDPs by taking advantage of the superior resolution in the 1H-15N correlation spectrum. In this sequence, magnetization is transferred after 1H CEST using a triple resonance coherence transfer pathway from 1Hα (i) to 1HN(i + 1) during which the 15N(t1) and 1HN(t2) are frequency labelled. This approach is integrated with spin state-selective CEST for eliminating spurious dips in CEST profiles resulting from dipolar cross-relaxation. We apply this sequence to determine the excited state 1Hα chemical shifts of the intrinsically disordered DNA binding domain (CytRN) of the bacterial cytidine repressor (CytR), which transiently acquires a functional globally folded conformation. The structure of the excited state, calculated using 1Hα chemical shifts in conjunction with other excited state NMR restraints, is a three-helix bundle incorporating a helix-turn-helix motif that is vital for binding DNA.

Conformational Tuning Shapes the Balance between Functional Promiscuity and Specialization in Paralogous Plasmodium Acyl-CoA Binding Proteins.

Paralogous proteins confer enhanced fitness to organisms via complex sequence-conformation codes that shape functional divergence, specialization, or promiscuity. Here, we dissect the underlying mechanism of promiscuous binding versus partial subfunctionalization in paralogues by studying structurally identical acyl-CoA binding proteins (ACBPs) from Plasmodium falciparum that serve as promising drug targets due to their high expression during the protozoan proliferative phase. Combining spectroscopic measurements, solution NMR, SPR, and simulations on two of the paralogues, A16 and A749, we show that minor sequence differences shape nearly every local and global conformational feature. A749 displays a broader and heterogeneous native ensemble, weaker thermodynamic coupling and cooperativity, enhanced fluctuations, and a larger binding pocket volume compared to A16. Site-specific tryptophan probes signal a graded reduction in the sampling of substates in the holo form, which is particularly apparent in A749. The paralogues exhibit a spectrum of binding affinities to different acyl-CoAs with A749, the more promiscuous and hence the likely ancestor, binding 1000-fold stronger to lauroyl-CoA under physiological conditions. We thus demonstrate how minor sequence changes modulate the extent of long-range interactions and dynamics, effectively contributing to the molecular evolution of contrasting functional repertoires in paralogues.

Weakening of interaction networks with aging in tip-link protein induces hearing loss.

Age-related hearing loss (ARHL) is a common condition in humans marking the gradual decrease in hearing with age. Perturbations in the tip-link protein cadherin-23 that absorbs the mechanical tension from sound and maintains the integrity of hearing is associated with ARHL. Here, in search of molecular origins for ARHL, we dissect the conformational behavior of cadherin-23 along with the mutant S47P that progresses the hearing loss drastically. Using an array of experimental and computational approaches, we highlight a lower thermodynamic stability, significant weakening in the hydrogen-bond network and inter-residue correlations among ß-strands, due to the S47P mutation. The loss in correlated motions translates to not only a remarkable two orders of magnitude slower folding in the mutant but also to a proportionately complex unfolding mechanism. We thus propose that loss in correlated motions within cadherin-23 with aging may trigger ARHL, a molecular feature that likely holds true for other disease-mutations in ß-strand-rich proteins.

Phosphorylation of Thr9 Affects the Folding Landscape of the N-Terminal Segment of Human AGT Enhancing Protein Aggregation of Disease-Causing Mutants.

The mutations G170R and I244T are the most common disease cause in primary hyperoxaluria type I (PH1). These mutations cause the misfolding of the AGT protein in the minor allele AGT-LM that contains the P11L polymorphism, which may affect the folding of the N-terminal segment (NTT-AGT). The NTT-AGT is phosphorylated at T9, although the role of this event in PH1 is unknown. In this work, phosphorylation of T9 was mimicked by introducing the T9E mutation in the NTT-AGT peptide and the full-length protein. The NTT-AGT conformational landscape was studied by circular dichroism, NMR, and statistical mechanical methods. Functional and stability effects on the full-length AGT protein were characterized by spectroscopic methods. The T9E and P11L mutations together reshaped the conformational landscape of the isolated NTT-AGT peptide by stabilizing ordered conformations. In the context of the full-length AGT protein, the T9E mutation had no effect on the overall AGT function or conformation, but enhanced aggregation of the minor allele (LM) protein and synergized with the mutations G170R and I244T. Our findings indicate that phosphorylation of T9 may affect the conformation of the NTT-AGT and synergize with PH1-causing mutations to promote aggregation in a genotype-specific manner. Phosphorylation should be considered a novel regulatory mechanism in PH1 pathogenesis.

Insight into the specificity and severity of pathogenic mechanisms associated with missense mutations through experimental and structural perturbation analyses.

Most pathogenic missense mutations cause specific molecular phenotypes through protein destabilization. However, how protein destabilization is manifested as a given molecular phenotype is not well understood. We develop here a structural and energetic approach to describe mutational effects on specific traits such as function, regulation, stability, subcellular targeting or aggregation propensity. This approach is tested using large-scale experimental and structural perturbation analyses in over thirty mutations in three different proteins (cancer-associated NQO1, transthyretin related with amyloidosis and AGT linked to primary hyperoxaluria type I) and comprising five very common pathogenic mechanisms (loss-of-function and gain-of-toxic function aggregation, enzyme inactivation, protein mistargeting and accelerated degradation). Our results revealed that the magnitude of destabilizing effects and, particularly, their propagation through the structure to promote disease-associated conformational states largely determine the severity and molecular mechanisms of disease-associated missense mutations. Modulation of the structural perturbation at a mutated site is also shown to cause switches between different molecular phenotypes. When very common disease-associated missense mutations were investigated, we also found that they were not among the most deleterious possible missense mutations at those sites, and required additional contributions from codon bias and effects of CpG sites to explain their high frequency in patients. Our work sheds light on the molecular basis of pathogenic mechanisms and genotype-phenotype relationships, with implications for discriminating between pathogenic and neutral changes within human genome variability from whole genome sequencing studies.

Molecular origins of folding rate differences in the thioredoxin family.

Thioredoxins are a family of conserved oxidoreductases responsible for maintaining redox balance within cells. They have also served as excellent model systems for protein design and engineering studies particularly through ancestral sequence reconstruction methods. The recent work by Gamiz-Arco et al. [Biochem J (2019) 476, 3631-3647] answers fundamental questions on how specific sequence differences can contribute to differences in folding rates between modern and ancient thioredoxins but also among a selected subset of modern thioredoxins. They surprisingly find that rapid unassisted folding, a feature of ancient thioredoxins, is not conserved in the modern descendants suggestive of co-evolution of better folding machinery that likely enabled the accumulation of mutations that slow-down folding. The work thus provides an interesting take on the expected folding-stability-function constraint while arguing for additional factors that contribute to sequence evolution and hence impact folding efficiency.

Controlling Structure and Dimensions of a Disordered Protein via Mutations.

The dimensions of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) are sensitive to small energetic-entropic differences between intramolecular and protein-solvent interactions. This is commonly observed on modulating solvent composition and temperature. However, the inherently heterogeneous conformational landscape of IDPs is also expected to be influenced by mutations that can (de)stabilize pockets of local and even global structure, native and non-native, and hence the average dimensions. Here, we show experimental evidence for the remarkably tunable landscape of IDPs by employing the DNA-binding domain of CytR, a high-sequence-complexity IDP, as a model system. CytR exhibits a range of structure and compactness upon introducing specific mutations that modulate microscopic terms, including main-chain entropy, hydrophobicity, and electrostatics. The degree of secondary structure, as monitored by far-UV circular dichroism (CD), is strongly correlated to average ensemble dimensions for 14 different mutants of CytR and is consistent with the Uversky-Fink relation. Our experiments highlight how average ensemble dimensions can be controlled via mutations even in the disordered regime, the prevalence of non-native interactions and provide testable controls for molecular simulations.

Non-specific DNA-driven quinary interactions promote structural transitions in proteins.

The nature and distribution of charged residues on the surface of proteins play a vital role in determining the binding affinity, selectivity and kinetics of association to ligands. When it comes to DNA-binding domains (DBDs), these functional features manifest as anisotropic distribution of positively charged residues on the protein surface driven by the requirement to bind DNA, a highly negatively charged polymer. In this work, we compare the thermodynamic behavior of nine different proteins belonging to three families - LacR, engrailed and Brk - some of which are disordered in solution in the absence of DNA. Combining detailed electrostatic calculations and statistical mechanical modeling of folding landscapes at different distances and relative orientations with respect to DNA, we show that non-specific electrostatic interactions between the protein and DNA can promote structural transitions in DBDs. Such quinary interactions that are strictly agnostic to the DNA sequence induce varied behaviors including folding of disordered domains, partial unfolding of ordered proteins and (de-)population of intermediate states. Our work highlights that the folding landscape of proteins can be tuned as a function of distance from DNA and hints at possible reasons for DBDs exhibiting complex kinetic-thermodynamic behaviors in the absence of DNA.

Protein plasticity driven by disorder and collapse governs the heterogeneous binding of CytR to DNA.

The amplitude of thermodynamic fluctuations in biological macromolecules determines their conformational behavior, dimensions, nature of phase transitions and effectively their specificity and affinity, thus contributing to fine-tuned molecular recognition. Unique among large-scale conformational changes in proteins are temperature-induced collapse transitions in intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs). Here, we show that CytR DNA-binding domain, an IDP that folds on binding DNA, undergoes a coil-to-globule transition with temperature in the absence of DNA while exhibiting energetically decoupled local and global structural rearrangements, and maximal thermodynamic fluctuations at the optimal bacterial growth temperature. The collapse is shown to be a continuous transition through a combination of statistical-mechanical modeling and all-atom implicit solvent simulations. Surprisingly, CytR binds single-site cognate DNA with negative cooperativity, described by Hill coefficients less than one, resulting in a graded binding response. We show that heterogeneity arising from varying binding-competent CytR conformations or orientations at the single-molecular level contributes to negative binding cooperativity at the level of bulk measurements due to the conflicting requirements of collapse transition, large fluctuations and folding-upon-binding. Our work reports strong evidence for functionally driven thermodynamic fluctuations in determining the extent of collapse and disorder with implications in protein search efficiency of target DNA sites and regulation.

Tunable order-disorder continuum in protein-DNA interactions.

DNA-binding protein domains (DBDs) sample diverse conformations in equilibrium facilitating the search and recognition of specific sites on DNA over millions of energetically degenerate competing sites. We hypothesize that DBDs have co-evolved to sense and exploit the strong electric potential from the array of negatively charged phosphate groups on DNA. We test our hypothesis by employing the intrinsically disordered DBD of cytidine repressor (CytR) as a model system. CytR displays a graded increase in structure, stability and folding rate on increasing the osmolarity of the solution that mimics the non-specific screening by DNA phosphates. Electrostatic calculations and an Ising-like statistical mechanical model predict that CytR exhibits features of an electric potential sensor modulating its dimensions and landscape in a unique distance-dependent manner, while DNA plays the role of a non-specific macromolecular chaperone. Accordingly, CytR binds its natural half-site faster than the diffusion-controlled limit and even random DNA conforming to an electrostatic-steering binding mechanism. Our work unravels for the first time the synergistic features of a natural electrostatic potential sensor, a novel binding mechanism driven by electrostatic frustration and disorder, and the role of DNA in promoting distance-dependent protein structural transitions critical for switching between specific and non-specific DNA-binding modes.

Thermally versus Chemically Denatured Protein States.

Protein unfolding thermodynamic parameters are conventionally extracted from equilibrium thermal and chemical denaturation experiments. Despite decades of work, the degree of structure and the compactness of denatured states populated in these experiments are still open questions. Here, building on previous works, we show that thermally and chemically denatured protein states are distinct from the viewpoint of far-ultraviolet circular dichroism experiments that report on the local conformational status of peptide bonds. The differences identified are independent of protein length, structural class, or experimental conditions, highlighting the presence of two sub-ensembles within the denatured states. The sub-ensembles, UT and UD for thermally induced and denaturant-induced unfolded states, respectively, can exclusively exchange populations as a function of temperature at high chemical denaturant concentrations. Empirical analysis suggests that chemically denatured states are ∼50% more expanded than the thermally denatured chains of the same protein. Our observations hint that the strength of protein backbone-backbone interactions and identity versus backbone-solvent/co-solvent interactions determine the conformational distributions. We discuss the implications for protein folding mechanisms, the heterogeneity in relaxation rates, and folding diffusion coefficients.

Engineering Order and Cooperativity in a Disordered Protein.

Structural disorder in proteins arises from a complex interplay between weak hydrophobicity and unfavorable electrostatic interactions. The extent to which the hydrophobic effect contributes to the unique and compact native state of proteins is, however, confounded by large compensation between multiple entropic and energetic terms. Here we show that protein structural order and cooperativity arise as emergent properties upon hydrophobic substitutions in a disordered system with non-intuitive effects on folding and function. Aided by sequence-structure analysis, equilibrium, and kinetic spectroscopic studies, we engineer two hydrophobic mutations in the disordered DNA-binding domain of CytR that act synergistically, but not in isolation, to promote structure, compactness, and stability. The double mutant, with properties of a fully ordered domain, exhibits weak cooperativity with a complex and rugged conformational landscape. The mutant, however, binds cognate DNA with an affinity only marginally higher than that of the wild type, though nontrivial differences are observed in the binding to noncognate DNA. Our work provides direct experimental evidence of the dominant role of non-additive hydrophobic effects in shaping the molecular evolution of order in disordered proteins and vice versa, which could be generalized to even folded proteins with implications for protein design and functional manipulation.

pStab: prediction of stable mutants, unfolding curves, stability maps and protein electrostatic frustration.

Summary: We present a web-server for rapid prediction of changes in protein stabilities over a range of temperatures and experimental conditions upon single- or multiple-point substitutions of charged residues. Potential mutants are identified by a charge-shuffling procedure while the stability changes (i.e. an unfolding curve) are predicted employing an ensemble-based statistical-mechanical model. We expect this server to be a simple yet detailed tool for engineering stabilities, identifying electrostatically frustrated residues, generating local stability maps and in constructing fitness landscapes. Availability and implementation: The web-server is freely available at http://pbl.biotech.iitm.ac.in/pStab and supports recent versions of all major browsers. Contact: athi@iitm.ac.in. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

A self-consistent structural perturbation approach for determining the magnitude and extent of allosteric coupling in proteins.

Elucidating the extent of energetic coupling between residues in single-domain proteins, which is a fundamental determinant of allostery, information transfer and folding cooperativity, has remained a grand challenge. While several sequence- and structure-based approaches have been proposed, a self-consistent description that is simultaneously compatible with unfolding thermodynamics is lacking. We recently developed a simple structural perturbation protocol that captures the changes in thermodynamic stabilities induced by point mutations within the protein interior. Here, we show that a fundamental residue-specific component of this perturbation approach, the coupling distance, is uniquely sensitive to the environment of a residue in the protein to a distance of ∼15 Å. With just the protein contact map as an input, we reproduce the extent of percolation of perturbations within the structure as observed in network analysis of intra-protein interactions, molecular dynamics simulations and NMR-observed changes in chemical shifts. Using this rapid protocol that relies on a single structure, we explain the results of statistical coupling analysis (SCA) that requires hundreds of sequences to identify functionally critical sectors, the propagation and dissipation of perturbations within proteins and the higher-order couplings deduced from detailed NMR experiments. Our results thus shed light on the possible mechanistic origins of signaling through the interaction network within proteins, the likely distance dependence of perturbations induced by ligands and post-translational modifications and the origins of folding cooperativity through many-body interactions.

A General Mechanism for the Propagation of Mutational Effects in Proteins.

Mutations in the hydrophobic interior of proteins are generally thought to weaken the interactions only in their immediate neighborhood. This forms the basis of protein engineering-based studies of folding mechanism and function. However, mutational work on diverse proteins has shown that distant residues are thermodynamically coupled, with the network of interactions within the protein acting as signal conduits, thus raising an intriguing paradox. Are mutational effects localized, and if not, is there a general rule for the extent of percolation and the functional form of this propagation? We explore these questions from multiple perspectives in this work. Perturbation analysis of interaction networks within proteins and microsecond long molecular dynamics simulations of several aliphatic mutants of ubiquitin reveal strong evidence of the distinct alteration of distal residue-residue communication networks. We find that mutational effects consistently propagate into the second shell of the altered site (even up to 15-20 Å) in proportion to the perturbation magnitude and dissipate exponentially with a decay distance constant of ∼4-5 Å. We also report evidence for this phenomenon from published experimental nuclear magnetic resonance data that strikingly resemble predictions from network theory and molecular dynamics simulations. Reformulating these observations onto a statistical mechanical model, we reproduce the stability changes of 375 mutations from 19 single-domain proteins. Our work thus reveals a robust energy dissipation-cum-signaling mechanism in the interaction network within proteins, quantifies the partitioning of destabilization energetics around the mutation neighborhood, and presents a simple theoretical framework for modeling the allosteric effects of point mutations.

Prediction of change in protein unfolding rates upon point mutations in two state proteins.

Studies on protein unfolding rates are limited and challenging due to the complexity of unfolding mechanism and the larger dynamic range of the experimental data. Though attempts have been made to predict unfolding rates using protein sequence-structure information there is no available method for predicting the unfolding rates of proteins upon specific point mutations. In this work, we have systematically analyzed a set of 790 single mutants and developed a robust method for predicting protein unfolding rates upon mutations (Δlnku) in two-state proteins by combining amino acid properties and knowledge-based classification of mutants with multiple linear regression technique. We obtain a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.79/s and a Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) of 0.71 between predicted unfolding rates and experimental observations using jack-knife test. We have developed a web server for predicting protein unfolding rates upon mutation and it is freely available at https://www.iitm.ac.in/bioinfo/proteinunfolding/unfoldingrace.html. Prominent features that determine unfolding kinetics as well as plausible reasons for the observed outliers are also discussed.

Graded Structural Polymorphism in a Bacterial Thermosensor Protein.

Thermosensing is critical for the expression of virulence genes in pathogenic bacteria that infect warm-blooded hosts. Proteins of the Hha-family, conserved among enterobacteriaceae, have been implicated in dynamically regulating the expression of a large number of genes upon temperature shifts. However, there is little mechanistic evidence at the molecular level as to how changes in temperature are transduced into structural changes and hence the functional outcome. In this study, we delineate the conformational behavior of Cnu, a putative molecular thermosensor, employing diverse spectroscopic, calorimetric and hydrodynamic measurements. We find that Cnu displays probe-dependent unfolding in equilibrium, graded increase in structural fluctuations and temperature-dependent swelling of the dimensions of its native ensemble within the physiological range of temperatures, features that are indicative of a highly malleable native ensemble. Site-specific fluorescence and NMR experiments in combination with multiple computational approaches-statistical mechanical model, coarse-grained and all-atom MD simulations-reveal that the fourth helix of Cnu acts as a unique thermosensing module displaying varying degrees of order and orientation in response to temperature modulations while undergoing a continuous unfolding transition. Our combined experimental-computational study unravels the folding-functional landscape of a natural thermosensor protein, the molecular origins of its unfolding complexity, highlights the role of functional constraints in determining folding-mechanistic behaviors, and the design principles orchestrating the signal transduction roles of the Hha protein family.

Toward a quantitative description of microscopic pathway heterogeneity in protein folding.

How many structurally different microscopic routes are accessible to a protein molecule while folding? This has been a challenging question to address experimentally as single-molecule studies are constrained by the limited number of observed folding events while ensemble measurements, by definition, report only an average and not the distribution of the quantity under study. Atomistic simulations, on the other hand, are restricted by sampling and the inability to reproduce thermodynamic observables directly. We overcome these bottlenecks in the current work and provide a quantitative description of folding pathway heterogeneity by developing a comprehensive, scalable and yet experimentally consistent approach combining concepts from statistical mechanics, physical kinetics and graph theory. We quantify the folding pathway heterogeneity of five single-domain proteins under two thermodynamic conditions from an analysis of 100 000 folding events generated from a statistical mechanical model incorporating the detailed energetics from more than a million conformational states. The resulting microstate energetics predicts the results of protein engineering experiments, the thermodynamic stabilities of secondary-structure segments from NMR studies, and the end-to-end distance estimates from single-molecule force spectroscopy measurements. We find that a minimum of ∼3-200 microscopic routes, with a diverse ensemble of transition-path structures, are required to account for the total folding flux across the five proteins and the thermodynamic conditions. The partitioning of flux amongst the numerous pathways is shown to be subtly dependent on the experimental conditions that modulate protein stability, topological complexity and the structural resolution at which the folding events are observed. Our predictive methodology thus reveals the presence of rich ensembles of folding mechanisms that are generally invisible in experiments, reconciles the contradictory observations from experiments and simulations and provides an experimentally consistent avenue to quantify folding heterogeneity.