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State Key Laboratory of Structural Chemistry for Stable and Unstable Species, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, Peoples Republic of China
Reprint requests to: Luhua Lai, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, Peoples Republic of China; e-mail: lhlai{at}pku.edu.cn; fax: 86-10-62751725.
| Abstract |
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-sheet secondary structure at pH 4.5 and 5.0, and an
-to-
transition is observed at pH 4.0. A red shift of the Congo red absorption spectrum caused by the precipitation of the fully reduced HEWL in the presence of 90% (v/v) ethanol is typical of the presence of amyloid aggregation. EM reveals unbranched fibrils with a diameter of 25 nm and as long as 12 µm. The pH dependence of the initial structure of the fully reduced HEWL in the presence of 90% (v/v) ethanol suggests that Asp and His residues may play an important role. Keywords: Amyloid fibril formation; hen lysozyme; disulfide reduction
Abbreviations: HEWL, hen egg white lysozyme DTTred, reduced DL-dithiothreitol TFE, trifluoroethanol CD, circular dichroism CR, congo red GdHCl, guanidine hydrochloride AEMTS, 2-aminoethyl methanethiosulfonate EDTA, ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid Tris-HCl, tris (hydroxymethyl) aminomethane hydrochloride
Article published online ahead of print. Article and publication date are at http://www.proteinscience.org/cgi/doi/10.1110/ps.03183404.
| Introduction |
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Recent studies show that amyloid formation is not only possible with disease-associated proteins, but also with proteins that are not associated with any known amyloid diseases under certain conditions (Guijarro et al. 1998; Chiti et al. 1999; Dobson 1999; Fandrich et al. 2001; Kallberg et al. 2001). Hen egg white lysozyme (HEWL), an extensively studied small protein with four disulfide bonds, is a recent example (Goda et al. 2000; Krebs et al. 2000). Amyloid fibrils formed from all these proteins that are not associated with any known amyloid diseases not only share similar morphological features with amyloid fibrils from disease-associated proteins, but also can be inherently highly cytotoxic (Bucciantini et al. 2002). Based on these observations, Dobson proposed that amyloid aggregation was a generic property of all polypeptides (Guijarro et al. 1998; Dobson 1999).
Study of the amyloid aggregation of nondisease-associated proteins cannot only help us understand the mechanism of amyloid fibrillogenesis, but also extend our understanding of the basic relationship between protein sequence and structure. A common strategy to convert a nondisease-associated protein to amyloid fibrils is destabilizing the protein either by mutation or by partial denaturation with heating or addition of alcohols (Chiti et al. 1999; Rochet and Lansbury 2000). Most of the above studies are based on partially denaturing the native structure of the target proteins; in other words, those target proteins still maintain a substantial amount of their native structures. One question remaining is whether or not unstructured polypeptides can form amyloid fibrils. To address this question, we used here the fully reduced HEWL as a random coil model polypeptide. In this article, we show that under appropriate conditions, the fully reduced HEWL can be converted to typical amyloid fibrils.
| Results |
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Figure 3
shows that TFE at concentration of 10% (v/v) can induce substantial
-helical structure in the fully reduced HEWL, and increasing the concentration of TFE only slightly increases the amount of induced
-helical structure. The induced
-helical structure is stable. No sign of
-to-
transition or amyloid fibrillogenesis was observed after weeks of incubation.
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-helical structure in the fully reduced HEWL. However, at high concentration of ethanol (
90% v/v), the CD spectrum shows a single negative peak around 215 nm, which is a typical feature of
-structure.
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-structure is formed almost immediately (within 3 min of manual mixing and spectrum recording time); while at pH 4.0, the initial conformation is mainly
-helical. The initial
-helical conformation at pH 4.0 will gradually transform to a
-structure after incubation for several hours at room temperature (Fig. 6
-structure contents) at all three pH conditions after 24-h incubation are similar, indicating that the difference among different pH conditions is kinetical.
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-structure of the fully reduced HEWL does not change with the change of protein concentration in the range used here.
To examine the stability of the
-structure of the fully reduced HEWL and the reversibility of the conformation transformation, fully reduced HEWL incubated in the presence of 90% (v/v) ethanol at pH 4.5 was diluted fivefold to a final ethanol concentration of 18% (v/v). The CD spectra of the original and diluted solutions (Fig. 7
) show that the diluted solution maintains most of the original
-structure. As 18% (v/v) ethanol cannot induce a
-structure in the fully reduced HEWL, this result demonstrates that the ethanol-induced
-structure of the fully reduced HEWL is relatively stable, and the reverse transformation from a
-structure to a helical structure is very slow. This is also an indication that the
-structure may be formed intermolecularly.
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Amyloid fibrils characterization
The fully reduced HEWL was incubated at room temperature, both in the absence and presence of 26 mM DTTred. At high concentration of the fully reduced HEWL (
4 mg/mL), Gel is formed after about a weeks incubation. Congo red binding assay of the aggregations of the fully reduced HEWL (Fig. 8
) shows a red shift of the maximum absorbance of Congo red from 497 nm to 537 nm, which is a characteristic of amyloid aggregation. EM (Fig. 9
) reveals fibrils of 25 nm in diameter and as long as 12 µm in length.
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| Discussion |
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-to-
transition and amyloid fibril formation
-helical segment of monomeric PrPC to a
-strand conformation is the main cause/result of the formation of aggregated PrPSc (Harrison et al. 1997), and an
-to-
transition is also regarded as a key step in the amyloid
-protein fibrillogenesis (Kirkitadze et al. 2001).
-to-
transition is also a common feature of amyloid fibrillogenesis in vitro from both nature proteins and designed peptides (Mihara and Takahash 1997; Fezoui et al. 2000). On the other hand, a survey of 1324 nonredundant proteins in PDB shows 37 segments of at least seven residues, which exist as helices in their native state, were predicted as
-strand structure; and experiments have managed to convert some of them into amyloid fibrils (Kallberg et al. 2001). These studies support the hypothesis that either
-to-
conformational changes or
/
-discordant helices in amyloidogenic proteins lead to amyloid fibril formation and cause diseases (Kelly 1996; Kallberg et al. 2001).
It is worthy to note that the fully reduced HEWL undergoes an
-to-
transition in the presence of 90% (v/v) ethanol at pH 4.0. Although no
-to-
transition step has been observed at pH 4.5 and pH 5.0, the similar amount of intermolecular
-structure induced by ethanol at all three pH conditions after 24-h incubation suggests that
-to-
transition steps might exist at pH 4.5 and 5.0 also, but with a faster kinetics that is not observable due to the slow mixing and spectrum recording time. In other words, the pH condition can significantly affect the
-to-
transition kinetics. CD spectra of native HEWL also show that HEWL has more
-helical structure at pH around 4.5 (data not shown) as judged by the CD value at 220 nm. A pH dependence of the kinetics was also observed in the first step in the A
amyloid fibrillogenesis, with two sharp transitional zones that were coincident with the pK values of Asp and His, and the most rapid kinetics occurred in the pH range of 4.55.0 (Kirkitadze et al. 2001). Therefore, the pH dependence of the
-to-
transition kinetics for the fully reduced HEWL in the presence of 90% (v/v) ethanol may be due to the ionization/protonation of Asp and His residues.
-to-
transition is also observed in the correct folding pathway of
-lactoglobulin (Kuwajima et al. 1987; Kuwata et al. 2001), which shows a CD signal overshoot at a millisecond time scale. Similar overshoot in the folding pathway of HEWL has been mainly contributed to the distortion of disulfide bonds (Chaffotte et al. 1992). However, pH (Cao et al. 2002) and organic solvents (Lai et al. 2000), such as ethanol and TFE, can significantly change the amplitude of the overshoot of HEWL, suggesting some degree of
-to-
transition in the early folding stage of HEWL. It is not clear whether or not there is any kind of correlation between the
-to-
transitions in the fibrillogenesis and folding process of HEWL.
Comparison with the fibrillogenesis of disulfide-intact HEWL
The fibrillogeneses of the disulfide-intact and the fully reduced HEWL show obvious differences. The fully reduced HEWL in the absence of structure-inducing reagents such as ethanol shows no ordered structure, and can be roughly considered as a random coil model, as shown in Figure 2
. In the presence of 90% (v/v) ethanol, the disulfide-intact HEWL is destabilized and partially unfolded, the very first intermediate, before the formation of interpolypeptide interaction and intermolecular
-structure, is possibly also a folding intermediate. Although the peptide chain of the fully reduced HEWL, without the four disulfide bonds constraint, is flexible and can explore much greater conformational space than the disulfide-intact HEWL, so, even after significant
-helical structure formed in the presence of 90% (v/v) ethanol at pH 4.0, the early
-helical intermediate is totally different from that of the disulfide-intact HEWL, and is not likely relevant to the folding process of HEWL. As can be seen in Figure 2
, both secondary and tertiary structures in the presence of 90% (v/v) ethanol are different between the disulfide-intact (Goda et al. 2000) and the fully reduced HEWL.
The different flexibilities and structures between the native and the fully reduced HEWL might be one of the causes of the different morphology between the final amyloid fibrils. Different mechanisms might also be involved. The fibrils formed from the fully reduced HEWL has a diameter of 25 nm, which is thinner than 7 nm for the native HEWL (Goda et al. 2000; Krebs et al. 2000). But it is also possible that other reasons, such as incubating conditions, may be more important to the morphology of the amyloid fibrils.
The fibrillogenesis of the fully reduced HEWL is also different from the fibrillogenesis of the 3S lysozyme reported recently (Takase et al. 2002). The 3S lysozyme, which maintains most of the native structure of disulfide-intact lysozyme with only subtle difference (Takase et al. 2002), is also one way to partially destabilize lysozymes native structure. Therefore, the fibrillogenesis of 3S lysozyme is more relevant to that of disulfide-intact lysozyme than to that of fully reduced HEWL. In the same report, an extensively reduced lysozyme is also converted to a protofilament. But this extensively reduced lysozyme is not fully reduced as pointed out by the authors (Takase et al. 2002); so it cannot be used as a random coil model. While in our experiments, the purity of the fully reduced HEWL is greater than 95% as checked by cation exchange chromatography.
In this article, we have managed to convert the fully reduced HEWL, a nearly random coil polypeptide, to highly ordered amyloid fibrils. Our results support Dobsons hypothesis (Guijarro et al. 1998; Dobson 1999) that amyloid fibrillogenesis is a generic property of all polypeptides.
| Materials and methods |
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Preparation of the fully reduced HEWL
HEWL (15 mg/mL) in 0.1 M Tris-HCl, 1 mM EDTA, 7M GdHCl, and 0.2 M DTTred at pH 8.6 was degassed by humidified ultrapure nitrogen gas and incubated for 24 h at room temperature. The reduced HEWL solution was acidified to pH 3 by acetic acid, and then desalted by elution on a G25 superfine column with 100 mM acetic acid solution. The purified protein was ultrafiltered by Ultrafree-15 (MWCO 5000, Millipore) to a final concentration of 1020 mg/mL (in the presence of 100 mM acetic acid), and stored at -20°C. The purity of the reduced HEWL (>95%) was checked on cation exchange chromatography (HiTrap SP), after being blocked with AEMTS at pH 8.0.
To prevent oxidation, all the experiments were carried out at acidic condition. For long-time incubation, experiments were also carried out in the presence of 26 mM DTTred for comparison.
Preparation of the fully reduced HEWL amyloid fibrils
Stock solution of the fully reduced HEWL were dissolved at a concentration of about 2 mg/mL in 90% ethanol, 20 mM acetic acid, pH 4.5, with/without 2 mM DTTred; the resulting solution was incubated at room temperature for different lengths of time. To accelerate the formation of fibrils, after 24 h of incubation at the above condition, the above solutions were concentrated to about one-third of its original volume by purge of dry ultrapure nitrogen, and then incubated at room temperature. Incubation of the fully reduced HEWL in the presence of 26 mM DTTred shows no significant difference from that in the absence of DTTred, that is, air oxidation in the acidic solution used in all our experiments is negligible even in the absence of DTTred.
Circular dichroism
CD spectra were recorded on Jobin Yvon CD6 with 1-mm and 0.1-mm pathlength cylinder quartz cuvettes for near UV and far UV, respectively. The concentrations of HEWL were determined by UV absorbance at 280 nm, with extinction coefficients (
1mg/mL) of 2.63 and 2.37 for native and reduced HEWL, respectively (Goldberg et al. 1991).
Congo red binding assay
A 200-µM stock solution of Congo red was prepared in 50 mM PBS, 100 mM NaCl, and 10% ethanol at pH 6.9. Ethanol was added to the stock solution to prevent CR micelle formation. The CR solution was filtered three times through a 0.2-µM filter before use. In a typical assay, the protein sample was mixed with a solution of CR to yield a final CR concentration of 10 µM and a final protein concentration of 13 µM, and then incubated at room temperature for at least 30 min before recording the absorbance spectrum on a Perkin-Elmer Lambda 45 spectrometer.
Electron microscopy
Samples were first filtered to remove nonaggregated material, using a Centricon YM-100 filter (Amicon), and then diluted 10-fold. A 5-µL drop of the diluted solution was applied to a carbon-coated Formvar grid, and blotted after 30 sec. A 5-µL drop of 2% (w/v) uranyl acetate solution was placed on the grid, and blotted after 10 sec, and then washed by a drop of deionized water and air dried. The resulting grid was examined using a JEOL JEM 100CX transmission electron microscope.
| 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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