Search results for "Molecular biophysics"

Light-induced structural changes in a monomeric bacteriophytochrome

2016

International audience; Phytochromes sense red light in plants and various microorganism. Light absorption causes structural changes within the protein, which alter its biochemical activity. Bacterial phytochromes are dimeric proteins, but the functional relevance of this arrangement remains unclear. Here, we use time-resolved X-ray scattering to reveal the solution structural change of a monomeric variant of the photosensory core module of the phytochrome from Deinococcus radiodurans. The data reveal two motions, a bend and a twist of the PHY domain with respect to the chromophore-binding domains. Infrared spectroscopy shows the refolding of the PHY tongue. We conclude that a monomer of th…

Dynamic coarse-graining fills the gap between atomistic simulations and experimental investigations of mechanical unfolding

2017

We present a dynamic coarse-graining technique that allows to simulate the mechanical unfolding of biomolecules or molecular complexes on experimentally relevant time scales. It is based on Markov state models (MSM), which we construct from molecular dynamics simulations using the pulling coordinate as an order parameter. We obtain a sequence of MSMs as a function of the discretized pulling coordinate, and the pulling process is modeled by switching among the MSMs according to the protocol applied to unfold the complex. This way we cover seven orders of magnitude in pulling speed. In the region of rapid pulling we additionally perform steered molecular dynamics simulations and find excellen…

2020

Phytochrome proteins control the growth, reproduction, and photosynthesis of plants, fungi, and bacteria. Light is detected by a bilin cofactor, but it remains elusive how this leads to activation of the protein through structural changes. We present serial femtosecond X-ray crystallographic data of the chromophore-binding domains of a bacterial phytochrome at delay times of 1 ps and 10 ps after photoexcitation. The data reveal a twist of the D-ring, which leads to partial detachment of the chromophore from the protein. Unexpectedly, the conserved so-called pyrrole water is photodissociated from the chromophore, concomitant with movement of the A-ring and a key signaling aspartate. The chan…

The effects of pressure on the energy landscape of proteins

2018

AbstractProtein dynamics is characterized by fluctuations among different conformational substates, i.e. the different minima of their energy landscape. At temperatures above ~200 K, these fluctuations lead to a steep increase in the thermal dependence of all dynamical properties, phenomenon known as Protein Dynamical Transition. In spite of the intense studies, little is known about the effects of pressure on these processes, investigated mostly near room temperature. We studied by neutron scattering the dynamics of myoglobin in a wide temperature and pressure range. Our results show that high pressure reduces protein motions, but does not affect the onset temperature for the Protein Dynam…

FRET-based dynamic structural biology: Challenges, perspectives and an appeal for open-science practices.

2021

International audience; Single-molecule FRET (smFRET) has become a mainstream technique for studying biomolecular structural dynamics. The rapid and wide adoption of smFRET experiments by an ever- increasing number of groups has generated significant progress in sample preparation, measurement procedures, data analysis, algorithms and documentation. Several labs that employ smFRET approaches have joined forces to inform the smFRET community about streamlining how to perform experiments and analyze results for obtaining quantitative information on biomolecular structure and dynamics. The recent efforts include blind tests to assess the accuracy and the precision of smFRET experiments among d…

Theoretical study of the electronic spectrum of magnesium-porphyrin

1999

Multiconfigurational self-consistent field (SCF) and second order perturbation methods have been used to study the electronic spectrum of magnesium-porphyrin (MgP). An extended ANO-type basis set including polarization functions on all heavy atoms has been used. Four allowed singlet states of E1u symmetry have been computed and in addition a number of forbidden transitions and a few triplet states. The results lead to a consistent interpretation of the electronic spectrum, where the Q band contains one transition, the B band two, and the N band one. The computed transition energies are consistently between 0.1 and 0.5 too low compared to the measured band maxima. The source of the discrepan…

Non-equilibrium Markov state modeling of periodically driven biomolecules

2019

Molecular dynamics simulations allow to study the structure and dynamics of single biomolecules in microscopic detail. However, many processes occur on time scales beyond the reach of fully atomistic simulations and require coarse-grained multiscale models. While systematic approaches to construct such models have become available, these typically rely on microscopic dynamics that obey detailed balance. In vivo, however, biomolecules are constantly driven away from equilibrium in order to perform specific functions and thus break detailed balance. Here we introduce a method to construct Markov state models for systems that are driven through periodically changing one (or several) external p…

Application of model quality evaluation to systems biology

2008

Application of model quality evaluation to the quasispecies models is presented. These models are useful for the analysis of the DNA and RNA evolution and for the description of the population dynamics of viruses and bacteria. An estimate of the parameters together with their interval of variability is computed and the quality evaluation is tested on the basis of the model prediction error capability.

Comparison of some dispersion-corrected and traditional functionals as applied to peptides and conformations of cyclohexane derivatives.

2012

We compare the energetic and structural properties of fully optimized α-helical and antiparallel β-sheet polyalanines and the energetic differences between axial and equatorial conformations of three cyclohexane derivatives (methyl, fluoro, and chloro) as calculated using several functionals designed to treat dispersion (B97-D, ωB97x-D, M06, M06L, and M06-2X) with other traditional functionals not specifically parametrized to treat dispersion (B3LYP, X3LYP, and PBE1PBE) and with experimental results. Those functionals developed to treat dispersion significantly overestimate interaction enthalpies of folding for the α-helix and predict unreasonable structures that contain Ramachandran φ and …

Ab initio determination of the ionization potentials of DNA and RNA nucleobases

2006

Quantum chemical high level ab initio coupled-cluster and multiconfigurational perturbation methods have been used to compute vertical and adiabatic ionization potentials of the five canonical DNA and RNA nucleobases: uracil, thymine, cytosine, adenine, and guanine. Several states of their cations have been also calculated. The present results represent a systematic compendium of these magnitudes, establishing theoretical reference values at a level not reported before, calibrating computational strategies, and guiding the assignment of the features in the experimental photoelectron spectra. Daniel.Roca@uv.es Mercedes.Rubio@uv.es Manuela.Merchan@uv.es Luis.Serrano@uv.es