论文标题

为什么弹性蛋白样的多肽可能在水乙醇和水 - 尿液混合物中具有不同的溶剂化行为?

Why Do Elastin-Like Polypeptides Possibly Have Different Solvation Behaviors in Water-Ethanol and Water-Urea Mixtures?

论文作者

Zhao, Yani, Singh, Manjesh K., Kremer, Kurt, Cortes-Huerto, Robinson, Mukherji, Debashish

论文摘要

溶剂质量决定了聚合物的崩溃或扩展状态。例如,聚合物溶解在较差的溶剂中,而在良好的溶剂中会打开。尽管这种标准的理解通常是有效的,但也有一些例子,即即使在两个好的溶剂的混合物中,聚合物也会崩溃。这种现象(通常称为共同溶化)通常与智能聚合物有关。此外,最近的实验表明,弹性蛋白样的多肽(ELP)在水溶液 - 乙醇混合物中表现出共溶性行为。在这项研究中,我们使用全原子和互补的显式溶剂通用模型的分子动力学模拟了水性二元混合物中ELP的相行为。通过将从全原子模拟获得的溶剂化自由能映射到通用相互作用参数上,该模型是参数化的。为此,我们得出了四种不同肽的基于段的通用参数,即脯氨酸(P),缬氨酸(V),甘氨酸(G)和丙氨酸(A)。在这里,我们比较了两个ELP序列(即VPGGG和VPGVG)在水性乙醇和尿素混合物中的构象行为。与最近的实验一致,我们发现ELP在水溶液混合物中表现出共溶性。乙醇分子与所有ELP残基都具有优先结合,从而驱动了线圈到全球的跃迁。相反,ELP构象在水溶液混合物中显示出较弱的变化。我们的模拟表明,甘氨酸残基决定了ELP在水溶液中的总体行为,在尿素分子中,尿素分子与甘氨酸的优先结合相当弱,即小于kt。尽管后一个发现的验证将需要更详细的实验研究,但此处介绍的结果可能为目前对与肽和蛋白质杂质相互作用的当前理解提供了新的转变。

The solvent quality determines the collapsed or the expanded state of a polymer. For example, a polymer dissolved in a poor solvent collapses, whereas in a good solvent it opens up. While this standard understanding is generally valid, there are examples when a polymer collapses even in a mixture of two good solvents. This phenomenon, commonly known as co-non-solvency, is usually associated with smart polymers. Moreover, recent experiments have shown that the elastin-like polypeptides (ELPs) show co-non-solvency behavior in aqueous-ethanol mixtures. In this study, we investigate the phase behavior of ELPs in aqueous binary mixtures using molecular dynamics simulations of all-atom and complementary explicit solvent generic models. The model is parameterized by mapping the solvation free energy obtained from the all-atom simulations onto the generic interaction parameters. For this purpose, we derive segment based generic parameters for four different peptides, namely proline (P), valine (V), glycine (G) and alanine (A). Here we compare the conformational behavior of two ELP sequences, namely VPGGG and VPGVG, in aqueous-ethanol and -urea mixtures. Consistent with recent experiments, we find that ELPs show co-non-solvency in aqueous-ethanol mixtures. Ethanol molecules have preferential binding with all ELP residues and thus driving the coil-to-globule transition. On the contrary, ELP conformations show weak variation in aqueous-urea mixtures. Our simulations suggest that the glycine residues dictate the overall behavior of ELPs in aqueous-urea, where urea molecules have a rather weak preferential binding with glycine, i.e., less than kT. While the validation of the latter findings will require more detailed experimental investigation, the results presented here may provide a new twist to the present understanding of cosolvent interactions with peptides and proteins.

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