Issue 10, 2020

Dynamic design: manipulation of millisecond timescale motions on the energy landscape of cyclophilin A

Abstract

Proteins need to interconvert between many conformations in order to function, many of which are formed transiently, and sparsely populated. Particularly when the lifetimes of these states approach the millisecond timescale, identifying the relevant structures and the mechanism by which they interconvert remains a tremendous challenge. Here we introduce a novel combination of accelerated MD (aMD) simulations and Markov state modelling (MSM) to explore these ‘excited’ conformational states. Applying this to the highly dynamic protein CypA, a protein involved in immune response and associated with HIV infection, we identify five principally populated conformational states and the atomistic mechanism by which they interconvert. A rational design strategy predicted that the mutant D66A should stabilise the minor conformations and substantially alter the dynamics, whereas the similar mutant H70A should leave the landscape broadly unchanged. These predictions are confirmed using CPMG and R solution state NMR measurements. By efficiently exploring functionally relevant, but sparsely populated conformations with millisecond lifetimes in silico, our aMD/MSM method has tremendous promise for the design of dynamic protein free energy landscapes for both protein engineering and drug discovery.

Graphical abstract: Dynamic design: manipulation of millisecond timescale motions on the energy landscape of cyclophilin A

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Edge Article
Submitted
18 sep 2019
Accepted
14 jan 2020
First published
15 jan 2020
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Creative Commons BY license

Chem. Sci., 2020,11, 2670-2680

Dynamic design: manipulation of millisecond timescale motions on the energy landscape of cyclophilin A

J. Juárez-Jiménez, A. A. Gupta, G. Karunanithy, A. S. J. S. Mey, C. Georgiou, H. Ioannidis, A. De Simone, P. N. Barlow, A. N. Hulme, M. D. Walkinshaw, A. J. Baldwin and J. Michel, Chem. Sci., 2020, 11, 2670 DOI: 10.1039/C9SC04696H

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given.

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