PART IV: PROTEIN EXPRESSION AND MODIFICATION Flashcards
What is the protein folding problem known?
- How does a protein’s aa sequence manage to fold into a 3D structure?
Why did Anfinsen choose to study the Bovine Panreatic Ribonuclease A for the protein folding problem? (3 reasons)
- Because it is small (124 aa)
- Contains 8 Cys residues
- Can degrade ribonucleic acid (enzymatic activity) –> use to measure the % activity
What does the substance BME do?
- Breaks the disulfide bonds
what does urea do?
- Denatures proteins by binding with H bonds thus inhibiting the bonds
In the Anfinsen experiments, what happened when BME was removed and urea was present?
- Only 1% of activity was reformed from the denatured protein
What does the result of only 1% of the denatured protein refolding after BME (disulfide bond breaker) was removed mean?
- That you need the rest of the protein to be in the correct conformation to be functional
In the Anfinsen experiments, what happened when both the urea and BME were removed?
- There was 100% folding and functionality again
Why does the native structure of proteins form naturally?
- Due to the Gibbs free energy (lowest energy state)
What is the thermodynamic hypothesis (Anfinsen)?
- that the 3D structure of a protein is what gives it the lowest delta G
- There are multiple intermediate stages to protein folding
Is the thermodynamic hypothesis valid for proteins without disulfide bonds?
- YES
Is the structure of a protein more conserved than sequence?
- YES
- Native state can be stabilised by a small number of conserved interactions
Approximately how many amino acids are conserved across evolution?
- Approx 5 aa (2 Tryp and 1 Pro)
Are lots or only a few amino acids crucial for a proteins structure?
- Only a few e.g. Beta strand structure
Can sequences of low similarity have the same 3D structure?
- YES!
- Different amino acids can code for the SAME strucutral domain
What are the two forms of predictions if conserved interactions are broken?
- Independent interactions (Stepwise ladder on graph)
- Cooperative (sigmoidal shape on graph)
What are 4 situations in which the Thermodynamic hypothesis may not be valid?
- Some proteins aggregate under certain conditions
- In vivo folding may require accessory proteins (chaperones)
- Zymogens –> Fold then are cleaved, mature protein may be ‘trapped’ in zymogen-like fold e.g. alpha-lytic protease
- Some proteins have more than one “native” structure
What are three reasons to consider the protein folding?
- Get protein structure prediction from protein databases
- Protein design/engineering and drug design
- Understand the molecular basis of diseases
What is thought to be the type of misfolding in Alzheimers, Huntingtons and Parkinsons?
- Amyloidosis–> formation of amyloid fibrils with highly ordered Beta strands
- Amyloid protein aggregates in weird ways and induces the misfolding of other proteins `
What is a proteome defined as?
- A set of proteins produced in an organism, system, or biological context
What is proteomics?
- Large scale study of proteomes
Does the quantity of RNA level and subsequent protein level matter?
- YES it does
What are 3 factors that influence protein levels?
- Localisation
- Damage and/or Degradation
- Post translational Modifications (PTM)
What does localisation of proteins involve (strucutres -4 of them)?
- Subcellular organelles
- Multiprotein complexes
- Membranes
- Extracellular spaces
What does damage and/or degradation involve in proteins?
- Heat shock
What does PTMs in proteins invovle? (8 PTMS)
- Proteolytic cleavage
- Acetylation
- Merthylation
- Phosphorylation
- Ubiquitination
- Sulfation
- Selenoproteins
- Gylcosylation
What does Phosphorylation usually change in a protein?
- The shape
What type of PTM (which molecule) do Plasma membrane proteins carry?
- N-glycans
What type of PTM (which molecule) do Nuclear and cytoplasmic proteins carry?
- O-glycans
What occurs in the Phosphorylation PTM?
- Introduces a -ve charged and hydrophillic group
What can cancer be caused by in proteins?
- By the alterations in the PTMs of proteins
e. g. Histones, NFkB, signalling proteins)
What are seven things that proteomics is good for?
- Obtaining the most complete possible information about the components of cells
- To determine the presence and effects of protein modifications
- Systems biology–> holistic view of the network of interactions leading to biological phenotypes
- Identification of cell-type markers
- Identification of disease markers
- Identification of potential drug targets
- tracking the progress of disease or therapy
What does personalised medicine allow for?
- The biomarkers to be targeted that someone has
- Narrow down the best treatment to target individual diagnosis (proteome of human cancer)
Do some anti cancer drugs accidentally target the normal instead of the diseased protein?
- YES
- This can lead to nasty side effects
What are the three different types of proteomics?
- Expressional prtoeomics
- Functional proteomics (limited protein sets to determine function–> interacting proteins in vivo)
- Structural proteomics ( high-throughput determination of protein structure)
What does expressional proteomics involve and what 3 questions are asked?
- Studying complete proteomes (from two deferentially treated cell lines)
- e.g. What proteins are present?
What are their expression levels?
What are their PTMs?
What are the steps in mass spec proteomics?
- EXTRACT proteins from biological sample
- TRYPSIN DIGESTION into peptides
- SEPARATE proteins from each other to ENRICH proteins with specific PTM
- Determine the IDENTITIES of the proteins (obtain partial sequences by Mass spec, identify full sequences from databases)
- Determine QUANTITIES of proteins
- Verify PTMS (separate proteins out based on PTM type)
Which kind of PTM occurs on Tyrosine residues and ads negative charges to the protein?
- Phosphorylation (but can also be on Serine or threonine)
What are the cleavage points for trypsin?
- Lys and Arg
What are the cleavage points for chymotrypsin?
- Phe, Trp and Tyr
What are the cleavage points for Pepsin?
- Leu, Phe, Tryp, Tyr
What is the first dimension in 2D gel electrophoresis?
- Separated according to molecular weights (the second step in procedure)
What is the second dimension in 2D gel electrophoresis?
- The spots migrate according to the pI (voltage) (first step in the process)