Slow folding of three-fingered toxins is associated with the accumulation of native disulfide-bonded intermediates

Biochemistry. 2001 Dec 18;40(50):15257-66. doi: 10.1021/bi0111956.

Abstract

Snake neurotoxins are short all-beta proteins that display a complex organization of the disulfide bonds: two bonds connect consecutive cysteine residues (C43-C54, C55-C60), and two bonds intersect when bridging (C3-C24, C17-C41) to form a particular structure classified as "disulfide beta-cross". We investigated the oxidative folding of a neurotoxin variant, named alpha62, to define the chemical nature of the three-disulfide intermediates that accumulate during the process in order to describe in detail its folding pathway. These folding intermediates were separated by reverse-phase HPLC, and their disulfide bonds were identified using a combination of tryptic hydrolysis, manual Edman degradation, and mass spectrometry. Two dominant intermediates containing three native disulfide bonds were identified, lacking the C43-C54 and C17-C41 pairing and therefore named des-[43-54] and des-[17-41], respectively. Both species were individually allowed to reoxidize under folding conditions, showing that des-[17-41] was a fast-forming nonproductive intermediate that had to interconvert into the des-[43-54] isomer before forming the native protein. Conversely, the des-[43-54] intermediate appeared to be the immediate precursor of the oxidized neurotoxin. A kinetic model for the folding of neurotoxin alpha62 which fits with the observed time-course accumulation of des-[17-41] and des-[43-54] is proposed. The effect of turn 2, located between residues 17 and 24, on the overall kinetics is discussed in view of this model.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Amino Acid Sequence
  • Animals
  • Cysteine / chemistry
  • Disulfides / chemistry
  • Kinetics
  • Models, Molecular
  • Molecular Sequence Data
  • Neurotoxins / chemistry*
  • Neurotoxins / genetics
  • Oxidation-Reduction
  • Protein Folding
  • Protein Structure, Secondary
  • Snake Venoms / chemistry
  • Snake Venoms / genetics
  • Spectrometry, Mass, Electrospray Ionization
  • Spectrometry, Mass, Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption-Ionization

Substances

  • Disulfides
  • Neurotoxins
  • Snake Venoms
  • Cysteine