Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Rajendran, Divya
• Mitra, Shrutarshi
• Oikawa, Hiroyuki
• Madhurima, Kulkarni
• Sekhar, Ashok
• Takahashi, Satoshi
• Naganathan, Athi N

Titel

Quantification of Entropic Excluded Volume Effects Driving Crowding-Induced Collapse and Folding of a Disordered Protein

Ist Teil von

• The journal of physical chemistry letters, 2022-04, Vol.13 (13), p.3112-3120

Ort / Verlag

United States: American Chemical Society

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• We investigate the conformational properties of the intrinsically disordered DNA-binding domain of CytR in the presence of the polymeric crowder polyethylene glycol (PEG). Integrating circular dichroism, nuclear magnetic resonance, and single-molecule Förster resonance energy transfer measurements, we demonstrate that disordered CytR populates a well-folded minor conformation in its native ensemble, while the unfolded ensemble collapses and folds with an increase in crowder density independent of the crowder size. Employing a statistical–mechanical model, the effective reduction in the accessible conformational space of a residue in the unfolded state is estimated to be 10% at 300 mg/mL PEG8000, relative to dilute conditions. The experimentally consistent PEG–temperature phase diagram thus constructed reveals that entropic effects can stabilize disordered CytR by 10 kJ mol–1, driving the equilibrium toward folded conformations under physiological conditions. Our work highlights the malleable conformational landscape of CytR, the presence of a folded conformation in the disordered ensemble, and proposes a scaling relation for quantifying excluded volume effects on protein stability.