Rapid Scan Electron Paramagnetic Resonance Spectroscopy Is a Suitable Tool to Study Intermolecular Interactions of Intrinsically Disordered Protein

Abstract

Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) are involved in most crucial cellular processes. However, they lack a well-defined fold hampering the investigation of their structural ensemble and interactions. Suitable biophysical methods able to manage their inherent flexibility and broad conformational ensemble are scarce. Here, we used rapid scan (RS) electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy to study the intermolecular interactions of the IDP α-synuclein (aS). aS aggregation and fibril deposition is the hallmark of Parkinson’s disease, and specific point mutations, among them A30P and A53T, were linked to the early onset of the disease. To understand the pathological processes, research intensively investigates aS aggregation kinetics, which was reported to be accelerated in the presence of ethanol. Conventional techniques fail to capture these fast processes due to their limited time resolution and, thus, lose kinetic information. We have demonstrated that RS EPR spectroscopy is suitable for studying aS aggregation by resolving underlying kinetics and highlighting differences in fibrillization behavior. RS EPR spectroscopy outperforms traditional EPR methods in terms of sensitivity by a factor of 5 in our case while significantly reducing data acquisition time. Thus, we were able to sample short time intervals capturing single events taking place during the aggregation process. Further studies will therefore be able to shed light on biological processes proceeding on fast time scales.

Order-of-magnitude SNR improvement for high-field EPR spectrometers via 3D printed quasi-optical sample holders

“…Rapid-scan EPR can also be used to monitor the kinetics of molecular processes by recording entire spectra as a function of time. Such kinetic studies have been recently implemented at 9.5 GHz to study, for example, intracellular protein–lipid interactions ( 54 , 55 ) and the aggregation of intrinsically disordered proteins. To our knowledge, no kinetic studies using rapid-scan EPR have been performed in a very high-field EPR spectrometer (above 100 GHz).…”