A fluid salt-bridging cluster and the stabilization of p53.

p53 is a homotetrameric tumor suppressor protein that is found to be mutated in most human cancers. Some of these mutations, particularly mutations to R337, fall in the tetramerization domain and cause defects in tetramer formation leading to loss of function. Mutation to His at this site has been found to destabilize the tetramer in a pH-dependent fashion. In structures of the tetramerization domain determined by crystallography, R337 from one monomer makes a salt bridge with D352 from another monomer, apparently helping to stabilize the tetramer. Here we present molecular dynamics simulations of wild-type p53 and the R337His mutant at several different pH and salt conditions. We find that the 337-352 salt bridge is joined by two other charged side chains, R333 and E349. These four residues do not settle into a fixed pattern of salt bridging, but continue to exchange salt-bridging partners on the nanosecond time scale throughout the simulation. This unusual system of fluid salt bridging may explain the previous finding from alanine scanning experiments that R333 contributes significantly to protein stability, even though in the crystal structure it is extended outward into solvent. This extended conformation of R333 appears to be the result of a specific crystal contact and, this contact being absent in the simulation, R333 turns inward to join its interaction partners. When R337 is mutated to His but remains positively charged, it maintains the original interaction with D352, but the newly observed interaction with E349 is weakened, accounting for the reduced stability of R337H even under mildly acidic conditions. When this His is deprotonated, the interaction with D352 is also lost, accounting for the further destabilization observed under mildly alkaline conditions. Simulations were carried out using both explicit and implicit solvent models, and both displayed similar behavior of the fluid salt-bridging cluster, suggesting that implicit solvent models can capture at least the qualitative features of this phenomenon as well as explicit solvent. Simulations under strongly acidic conditions in implicit solvent displayed the beginnings of the unfolding process, a destabilization of the hydrophobic dimer-dimer interface. Computational alanine scanning using the molecular mechanics Poisson-Boltzmann surface area method showed significant correlation to experimental unfolding data for charged and polar residues, but much weaker correlation for hydrophobic residues.

Force field influences in beta-hairpin folding simulations.

All-atom force fields are now routinely used for more detailed understanding of protein folding mechanisms. However, it has been pointed out that use of all-atom force fields does not guarantee more accurate representations of proteins; in fact, sometimes it even leads to biased structural distributions. Indeed, several issues remain to be solved in force field developments, such as accurate treatment of implicit solvation for efficient conformational sampling and proper treatment of backbone interactions for secondary structure propensities. In this study, we first investigate the quality of several recently improved backbone interaction schemes in AMBER for folding simulations of a beta-hairpin peptide, and further study their influences on the peptide's folding mechanism. Due to the significant number of simulations needed for a thorough analysis of tested force fields, the implicit Poisson-Boltzmann solvent was used in all simulations. The chosen implicit solvent was found to be reasonable for studies of secondary structures based on a set of simulations of both alpha-helical and beta-hairpin peptides with the TIP3P explicit solvent as benchmark. Replica exchange molecular dynamics was also utilized for further efficient conformational sampling. Among the tested AMBER force fields, ff03 and a revised ff99 force field were found to produce structural and thermodynamic data in comparably good agreement with the experiment. However, detailed folding pathways, such as the order of backbone hydrogen bond zipping and the existence of intermediate states, are different between the two force fields, leading to force field-dependent folding mechanisms.

Is Poisson-Boltzmann theory insufficient for protein folding simulations?

The Poisson-Boltzmann theory has been widely used in the studies of energetics and conformations of biological macromolecules. Recently, introduction of the efficient generalized Born approximation has greatly extended its applicability to areas such as protein folding simulations where highly efficient computation is crucial. However, limitations have been found in the folding simulations of a well-studied beta hairpin with several generalized Born implementations and different force fields. These studies have raised the question whether the underlining Poisson-Boltzmann theory, on which the generalized Born model is calibrated, is adequate in the treatment of polar interactions for the challenging protein folding simulations. To address the question whether the Poisson-Boltzmann theory in the current formalism might be insufficient, we directly tested our efficient numerical Poisson-Boltzmann implementation in the beta-hairpin folding simulation. Good agreement between simulation and experiment was found for the beta-hairpin equilibrium structures when the numerical Poisson-Boltzmann solvent and a recently improved generalized Born solvent were used. In addition simulated thermodynamic properties also agree well with experiment in both solvents. Finally, an overall agreement on the beta-hairpin folding mechanism was found between the current and previous studies. Thus, our simulations indicate that previously observed limitations are most likely due to imperfect calibration in previous generalized Born models but not due to the limitation of the Poisson-Boltzmann theory.