화학공학소재연구정보센터
Journal of Physical Chemistry B, Vol.119, No.9, 3621-3634, 2015
Dihedral Angle Entropy Measures for Intrinsically Disordered Proteins
Protein stability is based on a delicate balance between energetic and entropic factors. Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) interacting with a folded partner protein in the act of binding can order the IDP to form the correct functional interface by decrease in the overall free energy. In this work, we evaluate the part of the entropic cost of ordering an IDP arising from their dihedral states. The IDP studied is a leucine zipper dimer that we simulate with molecular dynamics and find that it does show disorder in six phi and psi dihedral angles of the N terminal sequence of one monomer. Essential to ascertain is the degree of disorder in the IDP, and we do so by considering the entire, discretized probability distribution function of N dihedrals with M conformers per dihedral. A compositional clustering method is introduced, whereby the N-S = N-M states are formed from the Cartesian product of each dihedrals conformational space. Clustering is carried out with a version of a k-means algorithm that accounts for the circular nature of dihedral angles. For the 12 dihedrals each found to have three conformers, among the resulting 531441 states, their populations show that the first 100 (500) most populated states account for similar to 65% (similar to 90%) of the entire population, indicating that there are strong dependencies among the dihedrals conformations. These state populations are used to evaluate a Kullback-Leibler divergence entropy measure and obtain the dihedral configurational entropy S. At 300 K, TS similar to 3 kcal/mol, showing that IDP entropy, while roughly half that would be expected from independently distributed dihedrals, can be a decisive contributor to the free energy of this IDP binding and ordering.