Molecular dynamics study of naturally existing cavity couplings in proteins

PLoS One. 2015 Mar 27;10(3):e0119978. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0119978. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

Couplings between protein sub-structures are a common property of protein dynamics. Some of these couplings are especially interesting since they relate to function and its regulation. In this article we have studied the case of cavity couplings because cavities can host functional sites, allosteric sites, and are the locus of interactions with the cell milieu. We have divided this problem into two parts. In the first part, we have explored the presence of cavity couplings in the natural dynamics of 75 proteins, using 20 ns molecular dynamics simulations. For each of these proteins, we have obtained two trajectories around their native state. After applying a stringent filtering procedure, we found significant cavity correlations in 60% of the proteins. We analyze and discuss the structure origins of these correlations, including neighbourhood, cavity distance, etc. In the second part of our study, we have used longer simulations (≥100 ns) from the MoDEL project, to obtain a broader view of cavity couplings, particularly about their dependence on time. Using moving window computations we explored the fluctuations of cavity couplings along time, finding that these couplings could fluctuate substantially during the trajectory, reaching in several cases correlations above 0.25/0.5. In summary, we describe the structural origin and the variations with time of cavity couplings. We complete our work with a brief discussion of the biological implications of these results.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Allosteric Site
  • Animals
  • Evolution, Molecular
  • Fructose-Bisphosphate Aldolase / chemistry
  • Fructose-Bisphosphate Aldolase / genetics
  • Fructose-Bisphosphate Aldolase / metabolism
  • Humans
  • Mice
  • Molecular Dynamics Simulation*
  • Mutation
  • Protein Conformation
  • Proteins / chemistry*
  • Proteins / genetics
  • Proteins / metabolism

Substances

  • Proteins
  • Fructose-Bisphosphate Aldolase

Grants and funding

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Funding for this work came from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (grant BFU2009-11527), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC, grant 200420E578; www.csic.es), and Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (BIO2012- 40133 and BIO2012-32868; www.mineco.es). MO acknowledges economical support from the ScalaLife European Project (www.scalalife.eu). XD acknowledges support from the Spanish Red de Supercomputación (www.bsc.es, projects BCV-2008-1-0012 and BCV-2009-1-0003). MB is the recipient of a Sara Borrell post-doctoral contract from the Ministerio de Sanidad y Consumo, Fondo de Investigación Sanitaria (fellowship: CD08/00241, Spain). MO is an ICREA Academia Fellow (www.icrea.cat). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.