Conformational change in protein–ligand complexes is widely modeled, but the protein accommodation expected on binding a congeneric series of ligands has received less attention. Given their use in medicinal chemistry, there are surprisingly few substantial series of congeneric ligand complexes in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). Here we determine the structures of eight alkyl benzenes, in single-methylene increases from benzene to n-hexylbenzene, bound to an enclosed cavity in T4 lysozyme. The volume of the apo cavity suffices to accommodate benzene but, even with toluene, larger cavity conformations become observable in the electron density, and over the series two other major conformations are observed. These involve discrete changes in main-chain conformation, expanding the site; few continuous changes in the site are observed. In most structures, two discrete protein conformations are observed simultaneously, and energetic considerations suggest that these conformations are low in energy relative to the ground state. An analysis of 121 lysozyme cavity structures in the PDB finds that these three conformations dominate the previously determined structures, largely modeled in a single conformation. An investigation of the few congeneric series in the PDB suggests that discrete changes are common adaptations to a series of growing ligands. The discrete, but relatively few, conformational states observed here, and their energetic accessibility, may have implications for anticipating protein conformational change in ligand design.

Multifunctional proteins often appear to result from fusion of smaller proteins and in such cases typically can be separated into their ancestral components simply by cleaving the linker regions that separate the domains. Though possibly guided by sequence alignment, structural evidence, or light proteolysis, determination of the locations of linker regions remains empirical. We have developed an algorithm, named UMA, to predict the locations of linker regions in multifunctional proteins by quantification of the conservation of several properties within protein families, and the results agree well with structurally characterized proteins. This technique has been applied to a family of fungal type I iterative polyketide synthases (PKS), allowing prediction of the locations of all of the standard PKS domains, as well as two previously unidentified domains. Using these predictions, we report the cloning of the first fragment from the PKS norsolorinic acid synthase, responsible for biosynthesis of the first isolatable intermediate in aflatoxin production. The expression, light proteolysis and catalytic abilities of this acyl carrier protein-thioesterase didomain are discussed.

Synthetic cavitands and protein cavities have been widely studied as models for ligand recognition. Here we investigate the Met102 → His substitution in the artificial L99A cavity in T4 lysozyme as a Kemp eliminase. The resulting enzyme had k cat ∕K M ¼ 0.43 M −1 s −1 and a ðk cat ∕K M Þ∕k uncat ¼ 10 7 at pH 5.0. The crystal structure of this enzyme was determined at 1.30 Å, as were the structures of four complexes of substrate and product analogs. The absence of ordered waters or hydrogen bonding interactions, and the presence of a common catalytic base (His102) in an otherwise hydrophobic, buried cavity, facilitated detailed analysis of the reaction mechanism and its optimization. Subsequent substitutions increased eliminase activity by an additional four-fold. As activityenhancing substitutions were engineered into the cavity, protein stability decreased, consistent with the stability-function tradeoff hypothesis. This and related model cavities may provide templates for studying protein design principles in radically simplified environments. enzyme design | model cavity

Metformin, an established first-line treatment for patients with type 2 diabetes, has been associated with gastrointestinal (GI) adverse effects that limit its use. Histamine and serotonin have potent effects on the GI tract. The effects of metformin on histamine and serotonin uptake were evaluated in cell lines overexpressing several amine transporters (OCT1, OCT3 and SERT). Metformin inhibited histamine and serotonin uptake by OCT1, OCT3 and SERT in a dose-dependent manner, with OCT1-mediated amine uptake being most potently inhibited (IC50 = 1.5 mM). A chemoinformatics-based method known as Similarity Ensemble Approach predicted diamine oxidase (DAO) as an additional intestinal target of metformin, with an E-value of 7.4 × 10−5. Inhibition of DAO was experimentally validated using a spectrophotometric assay with putrescine as the substrate. The Ki of metformin for DAO was measured to be 8.6 ± 3.1 mM. In this study, we found that metformin inhibited intestinal amine transporters and DAO at concentrations that may be achieved in the intestine after therapeutic doses. Further studies are warranted to determine the relevance of these interactions to the adverse effects of metformin on the gastrointestinal tract.

HtrA2 (high-temperature requirement 2) is a human mitochondrial protease that has a role in apoptosis and Parkinson’s disease. The structure of HtrA2 with an intact catalytic triad was determined, revealing a conformational change in the active site loops, involving mainly the regulatory LD loop, which resulted in burial of the catalytic serine relative to the previously reported structure of the proteolytically inactive mutant. Mutations in the loops surrounding the active site that significantly restricted their mobility, reduced proteolytic activity both in vitro and in cells, suggesting that regulation of HtrA2 activity cannot be explained by a simple transition to an activated conformational state with enhanced active site accessibility. Manipulation of solvent viscosity highlighted an unusual bi-phasic behavior of the enzymatic activity, which together with MD calculations supports the importance of motion in the regulation of the activity of HtrA2. HtrA2 is an unusually thermostable enzyme (TM=97.3 °C), a trait often associated with structural rigidity, not dynamic motion. We suggest that this thermostability functions to provide a stable scaffold for the observed loop motions, allowing them a relatively free conformational search within a rather restricted volume.

Low complexity regions (LCRs) in protein sequences are characterized by a less diverse amino acid composition compared to typically observed sequence diversity. Recent studies have shown that LCRs may co-occur with intrinsically disordered regions, are highly conserved in many organisms, and often play important roles in protein functions and in diseases. In previous decades, several methods have been developed to identify regions with LCRs or amino acid bias, but most of them as stand-alone applications and currently there is no web-based tool which allows users to explore LCRs in protein sequences with additional functional annotations. We aim to fill this gap by providing PlaToLoCo - PLAtform of TOols for LOw COmplexity—a meta-server that integrates and collects the output of five different state-of-the-art tools for discovering LCRs and provides functional annotations such as domain detection, transmembrane segment prediction, and calculation of amino acid frequencies. In addition, the union or intersection of the results of the search on a query sequence can be obtained. By developing the PlaToLoCo meta-server, we provide the community with a fast and easily accessible tool for the analysis of LCRs with additional information included to aid the interpretation of the results. The PlaToLoCo platform is available at: http://platoloco.aei.polsl.pl/.

The first committed biosynthetic step toward clavulanic acid, the clinically-important β-lactamase inhibitor, is catalyzed by the thiamin diphosphate (ThDP)-dependent enzyme N 2 -(2-carboxyethyl)arginine synthase (CEAS). This protein carries out a unique reaction among ThDPdependent processes in which a C-N bond is formed, and an electrophilic acryloyl-thiazolium intermediate of ThDP is proposed to be involved, unlike the nucleophilic enamine species typically generated by this class of enzymes. Here we present evidence for the existence of the putative acryloyl adduct, and report the unexpected observation of a long-wavelength chromophore (λ = 433 nm), which we attribute to this enzyme bound species. Chemical models were synthesized that both confirm its expected absorption (λ = 310-320 nm), and exclude selfcondensation and intramolecular imine formation with the cofactor as its cause. Circular dichroism experiments and others discount charge transfer as a likely explanation for the ~120 nm red shift of the chromophore (~25 kcal). Examples are well-known of charged molecules that exhibit significantly red-shifted UV-visible spectra compared to their neutral forms as, for example, polyene cations and dyes such as indigo and the cyanines. Rhodopsin is the classic biochemical example where the protein (opsin)-bound protonated Schiff base of retinal displays a remarkable range of red-shifted absorptions modulated by the protein environment. Similar tuning of the chromophoric behavior of the enzyme-bound CEAS acryloyl•ThDP species may be occurring.With the rise in resistance to penicillins and cephalosporins, the β-lactamase inhibitor clavulanic acid (1) has grown in importance for the treatment of bacterial infections 1 . Several mechanistically intriguing reactions take place in the biosynthesis of 1, 2 the first of which is mediated by N 2 -(2-carboxyethyl)arginine synthase (CEAS). The primary metabolites D-glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate (G3P) and L-arginine are recruited by this enzyme and reacted in a thiamine diphosphate (ThDP)-dependent internal redox process to yield N 2 -(2-carboxyethyl)arginine (6, CEA; Scheme 1). 3 The mechanism shown in Scheme 1 was proposed in accord with extensive isotopic labeling and stereochemical experiments. 3 NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript feature of this mechanism was the suggested intermediacy of an acryloyl-ThDP adduct 4. The observation of overall retention of configuration at the G3P β-carbon is consistent with a β-elimination/addition process proceeding by way of this highly electrophilic 4 partner for reaction with the incoming L-arginine. This is a unique reaction cycle among ThDPdependent enzymes where typically intermediates formed are nucleophilic rather than electrophilic, and N-C bond formation has not been seen previously.In this Communication we demonstrate the formation of the acryloyl species 4 and report the observation of an unexpectedly long-wavelength chromophore, which owes to the presence of the acryloyl inter...

Chemokines modulate the immune response by regulating the migration of immune cells. They are also known to participate in such processes as cell–cell adhesion, allograft rejection, and angiogenesis. Chemokines interact with two different subfamilies of G protein-coupled receptors: conventional chemokine receptors and atypical chemokine receptors. Here, we focused on the former one which has been linked to many inflammatory diseases, including: multiple sclerosis, asthma, nephritis, and rheumatoid arthritis. Available crystal and cryo-EM structures and homology models of six chemokine receptors (CCR1 to CCR6) were described and tested in terms of their usefulness in structure-based drug design. As a result of structure-based virtual screening for CCR2 and CCR3, several new active compounds were proposed. Known inhibitors of CCR1 to CCR6, acquired from ChEMBL, were used as training sets for two machine learning algorithms in ligand-based drug design. Performance of LightGBM was compared with a sequential Keras/TensorFlow model of neural network for these diverse datasets. A combination of structure-based virtual screening with machine learning allowed to propose several active ligands for CCR2 and CCR3 with two distinct compounds predicted as CCR3 actives by all three tested methods: Glide, Keras/TensorFlow NN, and LightGBM. In addition, the performance of these three methods in the prediction of the CCR2/CCR3 receptor subtype selectivity was assessed.