We have applied bioinformatic analysis of X-ray 3D structures of complexes of transcription factor NF-kappaB with DNAs. We determined the number of possible Van der Waals contacts and hydrogen bonds between amino acid residues and nucleotides. Conservative contacts in the NF-kappaB dimer-DNA complex composed of p50 and/or p65 NF-kappaB subunit and DNA sequences like 5 -GGGAMWTTCC-3 were revealed. Based on these results, we propose a novel scheme for interactions between NF-kappaB p50 homodimer and the kappaB region of the immunoglobulin light chain gene enhancer (Ig-kappaB). We applied a chemical cross-linking technique to study the proximity of some Lys and Cys residues of NF-kappaB p50 subunit with certain reactive nucleotides into its recognition site. In all cases, the experimentally determined protein-DNA contacts were in good agreement with the predicted ones.
A protein with the reversed direction of its polypeptide chain, retro-SHH, was analyzed by several spectroscopic techniques including circular dichroism and high-resolution NMR to understand its solution structure and structural consequences of interaction with the micelles formed by the zwitterionic detergent dodecylphosphocholine (DPC). This analysis revealed that retro-SHH does not contain rigid 3-D structure, but is characterized by the presence of residual secondary structure. Intriguingly, interaction with the DPC micelles affected the structures of SHH and retro-SHH very differently. In fact, micelles induce pronounced folding of retro-SHH, whereas micelle-bound SHH was noticeably disordered. Finally, we performed a disorder prediction with the PONDR-FIT algorithm and discovered that the reversal of the chain direction almost does not affect the propensity of a polypeptide for intrinsic disorder, since the disorder plot for retro-SHH was almost a mirror image of that for the normal SHH.
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