0000000000312817
AUTHOR
Patrice Delarue
Effect of hydrogen bonds on polarizability of a water molecule in (H2O)(N) (N = 6, 10, 20) isomers.
Abstract: Polarizabilities of the low-lying isomers of (H2O)N (N = 6, 10, 20) clusters were computed by using Density Functional Theory. The global polarizabilities of the water isomers were found to depend mainly on the total number of water molecules rather than their cluster structures. We show that this result hides in fact a strong heterogeneity of the molecular polarizability within the different isomers. The global polarizability of a cluster was divided into a sum of molecular contributions by using the Hirshfeld partitioning scheme. We reveal that the value of the local polarizability of a molecule in the cluster is correlated with the number and type of the hydrogen bonds (HB) the…
Raman and Infrared Spectra of Acoustical, Functional Modes of Proteins from All-Atom and Coarse-Grained Normal Mode Analysis
The directions of the largest thermal fluctuations of the structure of a protein in its native state are the directions of its low-frequency modes (below 1 THz), named acoustical modes by analogy with the acoustical phonons of a material. The acoustical modes of a protein assist its conformational changes and are related to its biological functions. Low-frequency modes are difficult to detect experimentally. A survey of experimental data of low-frequency modes of proteins is presented. Theoretical approaches, based on normal mode analysis, are of first interest to understand the role of the acoustical modes in proteins. In this chapter, the fundamentals of normal mode analysis using all-ato…
Patients with colorectal tumors with microsatellite instability and large deletions in HSP110 T17 have improved response to 5-fluorouracil–based chemotherapy.
Background & Aims Patients with colorectal tumors with microsatellite instability (MSI) have better prognoses than patients with tumors without MSI, but have a poor response to 5-fluorouracil–based chemotherapy. A dominant-negative form of heat shock protein (HSP)110 (HSP110DE9) expressed by cancer cells with MSI, via exon skipping caused by somatic deletions in the T 17 intron repeat, sensitizes the cells to 5-fluorouracil and oxaliplatin. We investigated whether HSP110 T 17 could be used to identify patients with colorectal cancer who would benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy with 5-fluorouracil and oxaliplatin. Methods We characterized the interaction between HSP110 and HSP110DE9 using su…
Human Inducible Hsp70: Structures, Dynamics, and Interdomain Communication from All-Atom Molecular Dynamics Simulations
The 70 kDa human heat shock protein is a major molecular chaperone involved in de novo folding of proteins in vivo and refolding of proteins under stress conditions. Hsp70 is related to several "misfolding diseases" and other major pathologies, such as cancer, and is a target for new therapies. Hsp70 is comprised of two main domains: an N-terminal nucleotide binding domain (NBD) and a C-terminal substrate protein binding domain (SBD). The chaperone function of Hsp70 is based on an allosteric mechanism. Binding of ATP in NBD decreases the affinity of the substrate for SBD, and hydrolysis of ATP is promoted by binding of polypeptide segments in the SBD. No complete structure of human Hsp70 is…
An ab initio softness metric to measure the similarity between all pairs of amino acids
Abstract The search for quantitative index of similarity between molecular moeties is important for its applications in pharmacology. Similarity is also an important concept in computational biology to measure the exchangeability of an amino acid by another in a protein sequence. In the present work, a distance between two molecules based on local and global softnesses of their fragments is defined. The method proposed is general and could be applied to any molecular library. It is first applied to compute the distance between the 190 pairs of different amino acids in their neutral states. Two amino acids belonging to the one of the biochemical class (aliphatic, sulfur-containing, acidic, ……
New Insights into Protein (Un)Folding Dynamics.
A fundamental open problem in biophysics is how the folded structure of the main chain (MC) of a protein is determined by the physics of the interactions between the side-chains (SCs). All-atom molecular dynamics simulations of a model protein (Trp-cage) revealed that strong correlations between the motions of the SCs and the MC occur transiently at 380 K in unfolded segments of the protein, and during the simulations of the whole amino-acid sequence at 450 K. The high correlation between the SC and MC fluctuations is a fundamental property of the unfolded state and is also relevant to unstructured proteins as Intrinsically Disordered Proteins (IDPs), for which new reaction coordinates are …
Decipher the mechanisms of protein conformational changes induced by nucleotide binding through free-energy landscape analysis: ATP binding to Hsp70.
ATP regulates the function of many proteins in the cell by transducing its binding and hydrolysis energies into protein conformational changes by mechanisms which are challenging to identify at the atomic scale. Based on molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, a method is proposed to analyze the structural changes induced by ATP binding to a protein by computing the effective free-energy landscape (FEL) of a subset of its coordinates along its amino-acid sequence. The method is applied to characterize the mechanism by which the binding of ATP to the nucleotide-binding domain (NBD) of Hsp70 propagates a signal to its substrate-binding domain (SBD). Unbiased MD simulations were performed for Hsp…
An improved goniometer head for high-temperature single-crystal X-ray diffraction
A reliable and inexpensive goniometer head has been designed. Its stability, resulting from its compact construction, makes it very suitable for accurate measurements. Moreover, its space-saving design facilitates its application in X-ray data collection using charge-coupled device (CCD) detectors. This head has been improved for high-temperature measurements and has been tested by comparison of accurate K0.88Rb0.12TiOPO4data collected both at room temperature and at 973 K on the same crystal. The excellent structure results obtained at 973 K during the 360 h of measurements prove the stability of the goniometer head.
Conformational dynamics of full-length inducible human Hsp70 derived from microsecond molecular dynamics simulations in explicit solvent
Human 70 kDa heat shock protein (hHsp70) is an ATP-dependent chaperone and is currently an important target for developing new drugs in cancer therapy. Knowledge of the conformations of hHsp70 is central to understand the interactions between its nucleotide-binding domain (NBD) and substrate-binding domain (SBD) and is a prerequisite to design inhibitors. The conformations of ADP-bound (or nucleotide-free) hHsp70 and ATP-bound hHsp70 was investigated by using unbiased all-atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of homology models of hHsp70 in explicit solvent on a timescale of .5 and 2.7 μs, respectively. The conformational heterogeneity of hHsp70 was analyzed by computing effective free-e…
Curvature and Torsion of Protein Main Chain as Local Order Parameters of Protein Unfolding
International audience; Thermal protein unfolding resembles a global (two-state) phase transition. At the local scale, protein unfolding is, however, heterogeneous and probe dependent. Here, we consider local order parameters defined by the local curvature and torsion of the protein main chain. Because chemical shift (CS) measured by NMR spectroscopy is extremely sensitive to the local atomic environment, CS has served as a local probe of thermal unfolding of proteins by varying the position of the atomic isotope along the amino-acid sequence. The variation of the CS of each C(alpha) atom along the sequence as a function of the temperature defines a local heat-induced denaturation curve. We…
4-Chloro-1,1-diphenyl-3-(1-pyrrolyl)-2-azabuta-1,3-diene
The title compound, C19H15ClN2, is the sole stable product resulting from nucleophilic attack of the sodium salt of pyrrole on 4,4-dichloro-1,1-diphenyl-2-azabuta-1,3-diene. The mechanism of its formation is briefly discussed.