Monthly Archives: September 2017

Proteins evolve on the edge of supramolecular self-assembly

Inspired by Eoin’s interesting talks on prions and prion diseases, and Nick’s discussion of how Cyro-Electron microscopy is going to be the end of an era for Crystallography. I thought I’d look at a paper that discusses aggregation of protein complexes, with some cryo-electron microscopy thrown in for good measure.

Supramolecular assembbly

a, A molecule gaining a single self-interacting patch forms a finite dimer. A self-interacting patch repeated on opposite sides of a symmetric molecule can result in infinite assembly. b, A point mutation in a dihedral octamer creates a new self-interacting patch (red), triggering assembly into a fibre.

Supramolecular assemblies are folded protein complexes forming into much larger units. This formation can be triggered by a mutation on a copy of the constituent homomers of the complex, acting as a self-interacting patch. If this patch were to form in a non-symmetric complex, it would likely form a finite assemble with a limited number of copies of the complex. However, if the complex has dihedral symmetry such that a patch is accessible at multiple separated locations, then complex can potentially form near infinite supramolecular assemblies. Continue reading

Slowing the progress of prion diseases

At present, the jury is still out on how prion diseases affect the body let alone how to cure them. We don’t know if amyloid plaques cause neurodegeneration or if they’re the result of it. Due to highly variable glycophosphatidylinositol (GPI) anchors, we don’t know the structure of prions. Due to their incredible resistance to proteolysis, we don’t know a simple way to destroy prions even using in an autoclave. The current recommendation[0] by the World Health Organisation includes the not so subtle: “Immerse in a pan containing 1N sodium hydroxide and heat in a gravity displacement autoclave at 121°C”.

There are several species including Water Buffalo, Horses and Dogs which are immune to prion diseases. Until relatively recently it was thought that rabbits were immune too. “Despite rabbits no longer being able to be classified as resistant to TSEs, an outbreak of ‘mad rabbit disease’ is unlikely”.[1] That being said, other than the addition of some salt bridges and additional H-bonds, we don’t know if that’s why some animals are immune.

We do know at least two species of lichen (P. sulcata and L. plumonaria) have not only discovered a way to naturally break down prions, but they’ve evolved two completely independent pathways to do so. How they accomplish this? We’re still not sure in fact, it was only last year that it was discovered that lichens may be composed of three symbiotic partnerships and not two as previously thought.[3]

With all this uncertainty, one thing is known: PrPSc, the pathogenic form of the Prion converts PrPC, the cellular form. Just preventing the production of PrPC may not be a good idea, mainly because we don’t know what it’s there for in the first place. Previous studies using PrP-knockout have shown hints that:

  • Hematopoietic stem cells express PrP on their cell membrane. PrP-null stem cells exhibit increased sensitivity to cell depletion. [4]
  • In mice, cleavage of PrP proteins in peripheral nerves causes the activation of myelin repair in Schwann Cells. Lack of PrP proteins caused demyelination in those cells. [5]
  • Mice lacking genes for PrP show altered long-term potentiation in the hippocampus. [6]
  • Prions have been indicated to play an important role in cell-cell adhesion and intracellular signalling.[7]

However, an alternative approach which bypasses most of the unknowns above is if it were possible to make off with the substrate which PrPSc uses, the progress of the disease might be slowed. A study by R Diaz-Espinoza et al. was able to show that by infecting animals with a self-replicating non-pathogenic prion disease it was possible to slow the fatal 263K scrapie agent. From their paper [8], “results show that a prophylactic inoculation of prion-infected animals with an anti-prion delays the onset of the disease and in some animals completely prevents the development of clinical symptoms and brain damage.”

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/prions/cjd/infection-control.html
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3323982/
[2] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/httpblogsscientificamericancomartful-amoeba20110725lichens-vs-the-almighty-prion/
[3] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6298/488
[4] “Prion protein is expressed on long-term repopulating hematopoietic stem cells and is important for their self-renewal”. PNAS. 103 (7): 2184–9. doi:10.1073/pnas.0510577103
[5] Abbott A (2010-01-24). “Healthy prions protect nerves”. Nature. doi:10.1038/news.2010.29
[6] Maglio LE, Perez MF, Martins VR, Brentani RR, Ramirez OA (Nov 2004). “Hippocampal synaptic plasticity in mice devoid of cellular prion protein”. Brain Research. Molecular Brain Research. 131 (1-2): 58–64. doi:10.1016/j.molbrainres.2004.08.004
[7] Málaga-Trillo E, Solis GP, et al. (Mar 2009). Weissmann C, ed. “Regulation of embryonic cell adhesion by the prion protein”. PLoS Biology. 7 (3): e55. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000055
[8] http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp201784a.html

Journal Club: Statistical database analysis of the role of loop dynamics for protein-protein complex formation and allostery

As I’ve mentioned on this blog a few (ok, more than a few) times before, loops are often very important regions of a protein, allowing it to carry out its function effectively. In my own research, I develop methods for loop structure prediction (in particular for antibody CDR H3), and look at loop conformational changes and flexibility. So, when I came across a paper that has the words ‘loops’, ‘flexibility’ and ‘antibody’ in its abstract, it was the obvious choice to present at my most recent journal club!

In the paper, entitled “Statistical database analysis of the role of loop dynamics for protein-protein complex formation and allostery”, the authors focus on how loop dynamics change upon the formation of protein-protein complexes. To do this, they use an algorithm they previously published called ToeLoop – given a protein structure, this classifies the loop regions as static, slow, or fast, based on both sequential and structural features:

  • relative amino acid frequencies;
  • the frequency of loop secondary structure types as annotated by DSSP (bends, β-bridges etc.);
  • the average solvent accessible surface area;
  • the average hydrophobicity index for the loop residues;
  • loop length;
  • contacts between atoms of the loop and the rest of the protein.

Two scores are calculated using the properties listed above: one that distinguishes ‘static’ loops from ‘mobile’ loops (with a reported 81% accuracy), and another that further categorises the mobile loops into ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ (74% accuracy). Results from the original ToeLoop paper indicate that fast loops are shorter, have more negatively charged residues, larger solvent accessibilities, lower hydrophobicity, and fewer contacts.

Gu et al. use ToeLoop to investigate the dynamic behaviour of loops during protein-protein complex formation. For a set of 230 protein complexes, they classified the loops of the proteins in both their free and complexed forms (illustrated by the figure below).

The loops from 230 protein complexes, in both free and bound forms, were categorised as fast, slow, or static using the ToeLoop algorithm. The loops are coloured according to their predicted dynamics. Allosteric loops, defined as those whose mobility increases upon binding, are indicated using blue arrows.

In the uncomplexed form, the majority of loops were annotated as static (63.6%), followed by slow (26.2%) and finally fast (10.2%). This indicates that most loops are inflexible. After complex formation, the number of static loops increases and the number of mobile loops decreases (67.8%, 23.0%, and 9.2% for static, slow and fast respectively). Mobility, on the whole, is therefore reduced upon binding, which is as expected – the presence of a binding partner restricts the range of possible movement.

The authors then divided the loops into two groups, interface and non-interface, according to the average minimum distance of each loop residue to the binding partner (cutoff values from 4 to 8 Å were tested and each gave broadly similar results). The dynamics of non-interface loops changed less upon binding than those of the interface loops (again, this was as expected). However, an interesting result is that slow loops are more common at the interface than any other parts of the protein, with 37.2% of interface loops being annotated as slow compared to 24.8% of non-interface loops. It is suggested by the authors that this is due to protein promiscuity; i.e. slow loops allow proteins to bind to different partners.

The 4600 loops analysed in the study were split into two groups based on their proximity to the interface. As expected, interface loops are affected more by binding than non-interface loops. Slow loops are more prevalent at the interface than elsewhere on the protein.

Binding-induced dynamic changes were then investigated in more detail, by dividing the loops into 9 categories based on the transition (i.e. static-static, slow-static, slow-fast etc.). The dynamic behaviour of most loops (4120 out of 4600) does not change, and those loops whose mobility decreased upon binding were found close to the interface (average distance of ~12 Å). A small subset of the loops (termed allosteric by the authors) demonstrated an increase in flexibility upon complex formation (142 out of 4600); these tended to be located further away from the interface (average distance of ~30 Å).

One of these allosteric loops was investigated further as part of a case study. The complex in question was an antibody-antigen complex, in which one loop distant from the binding site transitioned from static to slow upon binding. The loops directly involved in binding (the CDRs) either displayed reduced flexibility or remained static. The presence of an allosteric loop was supported by experimental data – the loop is shown to change conformation upon binding (RMSD of 3.6 Å between bound and unbound crystal structures from the PDB), and the average B-factor for the loop atoms increased on complex formation from around 26 Å2 to approximately 140 Å2. The authors also carried out MD simulations of the unbound antibody and antigen as well as the complex, and showed that the loop moved more in the complex than in the free antibody. The authors propose that the increased flexibility of the loop offsets the entropy loss that occurs due to binding, thereby increasing the strength of binding. ToeLoop could, therefore, be a useful tool in the development of antibody therapies (or other protein drugs) – it could be used in tandem with an antibody modelling protocol, allowing the dynamic behaviour of loop regions to be monitored and possibly designed to increase affinities.

Finally, the authors explored the link between loop dynamics and binding affinity. Again, they used ToeLoop to predict the flexibility of loops, but this time the complexes were from a set of 170 with known affinity. They demonstrated that affinity is correlated with the number of static loop residues present at the interface – ‘strong’ binders (those with picomolar affinity) tend to contain more static residues than more weakly binding pairs of proteins. This is in accordance with the theory that the rigidification of flexible loops upon binding leads to lower affinities, due to the loss of entropy.

Typography in graphs.

Typography [tʌɪˈpɒɡrəfi]
    n.: the style and appearance of printed matter.

Perhaps a “glossed” feature of making graphs, having the right font goes a long way. Not only do we have the advantage of using a “pretty” font that we like, it also provides an aesthetic satisfaction of having everything (e.g. in a PhD thesis) in the same font, i.e. both the text and graph use the same font.

Fonts can be divided into two types: serif and sans-serif. Basically, serif fonts are those where the letters have little “bits” at the end; think of Times New Roman or Garamond as the classic examples. Sans-serif fonts are those that lack these bits, and give it a more “blocky”, clean finish – think of Arial or Helvetica as a classic example.

Typically, serif fonts are better for books/printed materials, whereas sans-serif fonts are better for web/digital content. As it follows, then what about graphs? Especially those that may go out in the public domain (whether it’s through publishing, or in a web site)?

This largely bottles down to user preference, and choosing the right font is not trivial. Supposing that you have (say, from Google Fonts), then there are a few things we need to do (e.g. make sure that your TeX distribution and Illustrator have the font). However, this post is concerned with how we can use custom fonts in a graph generated by Matplotlib, and why this is useful. My favourite picks for fonts include Roboto and Palatino.

The default font in matplotlib isn’t the prettiest ( I think) for publication/keeping purposes, but I digress…

To start, let’s generate a histogram of 1000 random numbers from a normal distribution.

The default font in matplotlib, bitstream sans, isn’t the prettiest thing on earth. Does the job but it isn’t my go-to choice if I can change it. Plus, with lots of journals asking for Type 1/TrueType fonts for images, there’s even more reason to change this anyway (matplotlib, by default, generates graphs using Type 3 fonts!). If we now change to Roboto or Palatino, we get the following:

Sans-serif Roboto.

Serif font Palatino.

Basically, the bits we need to include at the beginning of our code are here:

# Need to import matplotlib options setting method
# Set PDF font types - not necessary but useful for publications
from matplotlib import rcParams
rcParams['pdf.fonttype'] = 42

# For sans-serif
from matplotlib import rc
rc("font", **{"sans-serif": ["Roboto"]}

# For serif - matplotlib uses sans-serif family fonts by default
# To render serif fonts, you also need to tell matplotlib to use LaTeX in the backend.
rc("font", **{"family": "serif", "serif": ["Palatino"]})
rc("text", usetex = True)

This not only guarantees that images are generated using a font of our choice, but it gives a Type 1/TrueType font too. Ace!

Happy plotting.