We report on a study that combines advanced fluorescence methods with molecular dynamics simulations to cover timescales from nanoseconds to milliseconds for a large protein, the chaperone Hsp90.

The process of protein crystallization from aqueous protein solutions is still insufficiently understood. During macroscopic crystal formation, occurring often on time scales from a few hours to several days, protein dynamics evolves on the molecular level. Here, we present a proof of concept and a framework to observe this evolving diffusive dynamics on the pico- to nanosecond time scale, associated with cluster or precursor formation that ultimately results in emerging crystals. We investigated the model system of the protein β-lactoglobulin in D2O in the presence of ZnCl2, which induces crystallization by electrostatic bridges. First, the structural changes occurring during crystallization were followed by small-angle neutron scattering. Furthermore, we employed neutron backscattering and spin–echo spectroscopy to measure the ensemble-averaged self- and collective diffusion on nanosecond time scales of protein solutions with a kinetic time resolution on the order of 15 min. The experiments provide information on the increasing number fraction of immobilized proteins as well as on the diffusive motion of unbound proteins in an increasingly depleted phase. Simultaneously, information on the internal dynamics of the proteins is obtained.

The crowded environment of biological systems such as the interior of living cells is occupied by macromolecules with a broad size distribution. This situation of polydispersity might influence the dependence of the diffusive dynamics of a given tracer macromolecule in a monodisperse solution on its hydrodynamic size and on the volume fraction. The resulting size dependence of diffusive transport crucially influences the function of a living cell. Here, we investigate a simplified model system consisting of two constituents in aqueous solution, namely, of the proteins bovine serum albumin (BSA) and bovine polyclonal gamma-globulin (Ig), systematically depending on the total volume fraction and ratio of these constituents. From high-resolution quasi-elastic neutron spectroscopy, the separate apparent short-time diffusion coefficients for BSA and Ig in the mixture are extracted, which show substantial deviations from the diffusion coefficients measured in monodisperse solutions at the same total volume fraction. These deviations can be modeled quantitatively using results from the short-time rotational and translational diffusion in a two-component hard sphere system with two distinct, effective hydrodynamic radii. Thus, we find that a simple colloid picture well describes short-time diffusion in binary mixtures as a function of the mixing ratio and the total volume fraction. Notably, the self-diffusion of the smaller protein BSA in the mixture is faster than the diffusion in a pure BSA solution, whereas the self-diffusion of Ig in the mixture is slower than in the pure Ig solution.

No abstract

each other when compared to the intrinsic propensities of a mostly unperturbed arginine in the tripeptide GRG. A conformational analysis based on experimentally determined J-coupling constants from heteronuclear NMR spectroscopy and amide I' band profiles from polarized Raman spectroscopy reveals that nearest neighbor interactions stabilize extended b-strand conformations at the expense of polyproline II and turn conformations. The results from MD simulations with an CHARMM36m force field and TIP3P water reproduce our results only to a limited extent. The use of the Ramachandran distribution of the central residue of GRRRG in a calculation of end-to-end distances of polyarginines of different length yielded the expected power law behavior. The scaling coefficient of 0.66 suggests that such peptides would be more extended than predicted by a self-avoiding random walk.