Association of cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator with epithelial sodium channel subunits carrying Liddle's syndrome mutations.

The association of the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) and epithelial sodium channel (ENaC) in the pathophysiology of cystic fibrosis (CF) is controversial. Previously, we demonstrated a close physical association between wild-type (WT) CFTR and WT ENaC. We have also shown that the F508del CFTR fails to associate with ENaC unless the mutant protein is rescued pharmacologically or by low temperature. In this study, we present the evidence for a direct physical association between WT CFTR and ENaC subunits carrying Liddle's syndrome mutations. We show that all three ENaC subunits bearing Liddle's syndrome mutations (both point mutations and the complete truncation of the carboxy terminus), could be coimmunoprecipitated with WT CFTR. The biochemical studies were complemented by fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM), a distance-dependent approach that monitors protein-protein interactions between fluorescently labeled molecules. Our measurements revealed significantly increased fluorescence resonance energy transfer between CFTR and all tested ENaC combinations as compared with controls (ECFP and EYFP cotransfected cells). Our findings are consistent with the notion that CFTR and ENaC are within reach of each other even in the setting of Liddle's syndrome mutations, suggestive of a direct intermolecular interaction between these two proteins.

Large-scale all-atom molecular dynamics alanine-scanning of IAPP octapeptides provides insights into the molecular determinants of amyloidogenicity.

In order to investigate the early phase of the amyloid formation by the short amyloidogenic octapeptide sequence ('NFGAILSS') derived from IAPP, we carried out a 100ns all-atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of systems that contain 27 peptides and over 30,000 water molecules. The large-scale calculations were performed for the wild type sequence and seven alanine-scanned sequences using AMBER 8.0 on RIKEN's special purpose MD-GRAPE3 supercomputer, using the all-atom point charge force field ff99, which do not favor ß-structures. Large peptide clusters (size 18-26 mers) were observed for all simulations, and our calculations indicated that isoleucine at position 5 played important role in the formation of ß-rich clusters. In the oligomeric state, the wild type and the S7A sequences had the highest ß-structure content (~14%), as calculated by DSSP, in line with experimental observations, whereas I5A and G3A had the highest helical content (~20%). Importantly, the ß-structure preferences of wild type IAPP originate from its association into clusters and are not intrinsic to its sequence. Altogether, the results of this first large-scale, multi-peptide all-atom molecular dynamics simulation appear to provide insights into the mechanism of amyloidogenic and non-amyloidogenic oligomers that mainly corroborate previous experimental observations.