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1 Department of Biochemistry and
2 Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA
Reprint requests to: David Baker, Department of Biochemistry, Box 357350, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA; e-mail: dabaker{at}u.washington.edu; fax: (206) 685-1792.
(RECEIVED October 11, 2002; FINAL REVISION January 15, 2003; ACCEPTED January 15, 2003)
Article and publication are at http://www.proteinscience.org/cgi/doi/10.1110/ps.0238603.
| Abstract |
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Keywords: FP1; simplified SH3; folding kinetics; NMR structure
| Introduction |
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Here we characterize the tertiary structure of the simplified 57-residue ß-sheet protein FP1 previously obtained from a combinatorial phage-display library based on the src-SH3 domain (Riddle et al. 1997; see Table 1
for sequence comparison between FP1 and src-SH3). The FP1 scaffold that supports the proline-rich peptide binding site of the SH3 domain is 95% Ile, Lys, Glu, Ala, and Gly. Previous qualitative structural characterization by gel filtration chromatography, circular dichroism, and NMR indicated that FP1 is folded. Compared to the wild-type src SH3, it is slightly destabilized, folds approximately twice as fast, and unfolds five times as fast. It binds to a proline-rich peptide ligand 20 times more weakly than the wild-type src SH3. In this study, we used NMR techniques to determine the structure of FP1, and we found that the topology of FP1 is very similar to that of the wild-type SH3. Further simplification of the FP1 sequence was achieved by simplifying the binding residues that were kept constant in the previous design strategy (Riddle et al. 1997), and the folding of the variants is compared to that of corresponding variants of the wild-type src-SH3 domain.
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| Results |
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, 13Cß, 15N, and 1H-N for the simplified protein FP1 in solution were carried out using standard 3D-triple-resonance NMR experiments (HNCA, HNCOCA, HNCACB, and CBCACONH). The sidechain proton assignments were obtained from 3D-HCCH-TOCSY, and 3D-HCCH-COSY experiments in combination with 3D-15N-edited NOESY-HSQC, 3D-13C-edited NOESY-HSQC experiments (about 95% of proton resonances were assigned).
13C
and 13Cß chemical shifts are predominately determined by the backbone conformation, and the chemical shift differences from the random coil values,
13C
and
13Cß (Ikura et al. 1991; Wishart and Sykes 1994), are indicators of secondary structure in folded proteins. In general, 13C
resonances are shifted downfield by an average of 2.6 ppm for
-helices, and shifted upfield by 1.7 ppm for ß-sheets. The correlation of
13C
and
13Cß values with secondary structure is enhanced by calculating (
13C
-
13Cß) for each residue (Metzler et al. 1993; Constantine et al. 1997). Also, whereas the individual
13C
and
13Cß values depend on the exact 13C chemical shift referencing (Wishart and Sykes 1994), (
13C
-
13Cß) does not, provided that the 13C
and 13Cß chemical shifts are taken from spectra that are similarly referenced. The (
13C
-
13Cß) values for FP1 are shown in Figure 3A
. Because the
13C
and
13Cß chemical shifts of src-SH3 have not been reported, for comparison we show in Figure 3B
the (
13C
-
13Cß) for the structurally related drk SH3 domain (Zhang and Forman-Kay 1995), generously provided by Dr. Julie Forman-Kay. Most values of
13C
-
13Cß are negative, indicating that FP1 contains primarily extended local structure with little helical content as in drk-SH3. The magnitude of (
13C
-
13Cß) of the FP1 in general is somewhat smaller than that of the drk-SH3, and no three consecutive residues in FP1 have (
13C
-
13Cß) values above 3ppm, suggesting some structural averaging. This is also supported by the measurement of three-bond coupling constants of JHN
: No three consecutive residues in FP1 have JHN
values all greater than 9.0 for the ß-sheet conformation or all smaller than 5.0 for the
-helix conformation (data not shown). However, the overall pattern of (
13C
-
13Cß) is remarkably similar in FP1 and the drk SH3 domain, suggesting a similar distribution of secondary structure propensity.
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Further simplification
The previous simplification of SH3 was achieved restricting nonfunctional residues to a five-letter alphabet: the nonpolar residue isoleucine (I), the polar residues lysine (K) and glutamate (E), alanine (A) for core positions, with not enough space for isoleucine and glycine (G) for conformational flexibility in turns. Is it possible to further simplify the sequence and retain the ability to fold? Four single-point mutations were made in FP1, Y14A, D23A, L32I, and S49A, to investigate this possibility. Y14 and D23 are involved in binding to the proline-rich peptide, and were kept unchanged in the previous simplification strategy, which relied on the peptide binding activity. The isoleucine substitution for leucine at position 32 is aimed to further simplify the hydrophobic composition of FP1. S49 may play an important role in folding of FP1, because T50 in SH3 plays an important role in the folding of the wt. src-SH3 domain (Riddle et al. 1999). The point mutations are all highlighted in the FP1 averaged structure (Fig. 6A
).
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Folding kinetics
Previous studies (Riddle et al. 1999) demonstrated that the distal ß-hairpin is formed in the transition state and is critical for the folding of the SH3 topology. Residues A45 and G51 play important roles in the folding transition of src SH3, and the corresponding mutations were made in FP1 (A44G and G50A) to investigate whether it has a folding mechanism similar to that of the wild-type SH3. Figure 6B
shows the folding profiles of Y14A, D23A, A44G, and G50A in comparison to that of FP1, and Table 3
lists the kinetic parameters for the mutants. Y14 in FP1, like Y14 in SH3, does not have much impact on either folding or unfolding. As in the wild-type SH3, the D23A mutant in FP1 does not have a significant effect on folding. However, the D23A mutant increases the unfolding of FP1 by 4.5-fold, whereas the unfolding of src SH3 was only increased twofold by the corresponding substitution. A44G in FP1 slows down the folding by threefold and has little effect on the unfolding, whereas A45G in SH3 slows down the folding by sixfold and has little effect on the unfolding. S49A in FP1 slows down the folding by threefold, but accelerates the unfolding by threefold, whereas T50A in SH3 slows down the folding by 13-fold, but has a minor effect on the unfolding. G50A in FP1 decreases the folding rate by twofold and increases the unfolding rate by twofold, whereas G51A in SH3 decreases the folding rate by eightfold and has no effect on the unfolding rate. The lower
values associated with the A44G, S49G, and G40A mutations in FP1 compared to src SH3 (Table 3
) suggest that FP1 has a less polarized folding transition state than that of src SH3 (Riddle et al. 1999).
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| Discussion |
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ß, and all-ß proteins completely redesigned using the method described by Kuhlman and Baker (2000), the only protein to be unfolded under physiological conditions was a completely redesigned SH3 domain). The relatively well defined NMR spectrum of FP1 compared to other designed all-ß proteins may reflect the selection for function used to obtain FP1 initiallyprotein function is likely to put greater constraints on the mobility of the structure than overall folding.
A striking feature of the folding mechanism of the src, spectrin (Martinez and Serrano 1999), and Fyn SH3 domains (Northey et al. 2002) is the polarization of the folding transition state: Part of the structure is largely formed and the rest, largely disrupted at the rate-limiting step in folding. The limited number of
values we were able to obtain for FP1 suggest that this polarization is somewhat decreased in the simplified protein. In src SH3, Y14A has a
value close to zero, whereas A45G, T50A and G51A have
values close to 1.0. In FP1, the
value of Y14A is increased to 0.20, and the
values of the latter three mutations are all below 0.8. In the wild-type protein, favorable specific interactions between the distal ß hairpin and the diverging turn may be sufficient to overcome the entropy of ordering additional residues, whereas partial disruption of some of these interactions in the course of simplification of FP1 may necessitate the formation of a large fraction of the protein structure to overcome the entropic barrier to folding.
| Materials and methods |
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The 15N- single-labeled and the 13C, 15N- double-labeled protein samples were made by growing the transformed E. coli cells in M9 minimal medium using 99.9% 15NH4Cl as sole nitrogen source and 99.9% 13C-glucose as sole carbon source. The level of labeling was estimated to be greater than 95% based on the result from mass spectrometry. The NMR sample conditions were 1.2 mM protein, 90% H2O/10% D2O 50 mM sodium phosphate (pH 6.0), and 400 mM sodium sulfate.
NMR experiments
All spectra were collected at 22°C on a four-channel Bruker DMX 500 MHz spectrometer equipped with a triple resonance, triple axis gradient probe. The backbone assignments were accomplished by straight-forward 3D-triple resonance experiments of HNCA, HNCOCA, HNCACB, and CBCACONH. The sidechain assignments were obtained from a 3D- HCCH-TOCSY, 3D- HCCH-COSY, and 120-msec 3D- 15N-edited NOESY-HSQC and a 120-msec 3D- 13C-edited NOESY-HSQC experiment. A series of J-modulated 1H, 15N- HSQC experiments were collected to obtain the JHN
coupling constants in order to derive the backbone
angle constraints for structural determination. A 3D- HNHB experiment was also carried out in order to gain some
1 angle constraints for structural determination. Spectra widths were typically 7000 Hz in the 1H dimension, 2000 Hz in the 15N dimension, and 12, 000 Hz in the 13C dimension at 500 MHz field strength. Sixteen transients were typically collected with a relaxation of 1.2 sec.
NMR data processing
NMR data were processed with NMRPipe software (Delaglio et al. 1995). Spectra were typically linearly predicted in the indirectly detected dimensions, apodized with a
/3-shifted sine bell square in both dimensions, and zero-filled. The NOESY spectra used in the structure determination were first multiplied by a
/2-shifted sine bell squared function and zero-filled to double the number of data points before Fourier transformation. The program PIPP (Garrett et al. 1991) was used for NOE crosspeak assignments and measurement of peak intensities.
Hydrogen-deuterium exchange
H-D exchange experiments were carried out by acquiring a series of 15N-HSQC spectra immediately after dissolving lyophilized FP1 protein in deuterated buffer. The exchange rates were estimated as described (Yi et al. 1996).
Structure calculation
Two NOESY spectra of 3D-15N-edited NOESY-HSQC and a 120-msec 3D- 13C-edited NOESY-HSQC were assigned and translated to 823 distance constraints classified as strong (1.803.0 Å), medium (1.804.5 Å), weak (1.805.5 Å), or very weak (1.806.0 Å). Twenty-seven
angle constraints and 13
1 angle constraints were obtained from the J-modulated HSQC series and 3D- HNHB experiment, respectively. Most angle constraints were allowed to vary by ±30°, and some were allowed to vary by ±50°. Structure calculations were carried out with X-PLOR using the standard substructure-embedding and simulated-annealing protocols of dg_sub_embed.inp, dgsa.inp, and refine.inp (Nigles et al. 1988; Brunger 1993). Some minor modification was made to dgsa.inp and refine.inp protocols with the starting temperature at 2500 K and the 5000 cooling steps. In addition, the chirality of nonstereospecifically assigned methyl and methylene protons was evaluated using the X-PLOR protocol swap15v.inp (Nigles et al. 1988; Folmer et al. 1997). Distance constraints involving the degenerate resonances of methyl and methylene protons were averaged.
Biophysical characterization
Biophysical characterization of all the mutants was performed at 22°C in 50 mM sodium phosphate, pH 6.0. The kinetics of folding and unfolding were determined by stop-flow fluorescence using a Bio-Logic SFM-4 stopped-flow instrument. All kinetic data were analyzed using a two-state model as described (Scalley et al. 1997). The 
G and
values listed in Table 2
for the mutants were calculated from the folding rates at 0.23 M guanidine, and the unfolding rates at 3.86 M guanidine without extrapolation to 0 M guanidine, as described (Riddle et al. 1999).
| Acknowledgments |
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The publication costs of this article were defrayed in part by payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked "advertisement" in accordance with 18 USC section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.
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