Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spin relaxation has become the mainstay technique to sample protein dynamics at atomic resolution, expanding its repertoire from backbone 15N to side-chain 2H probes. At the same time, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations have become increasingly powerful to study protein dynamics due to steady improvements of physical models, algorithms, and computational power. Good agreement between generalized Lipari-Szabo order parameters derived from experiment and MD simulation has been observed for the backbone dynamics of a number of proteins. However, the agreement for the more dynamic side-chains, as probed by methyl group relaxation, was much worse. Here, we use T4 lysozyme (T4L), a protein with moderate tumbling anisotropy, to showcase a number of improvements that reduce this gap by a combined evaluation of NMR relaxation experiments and MD simulations. By applying a protein force field with accurate methyl group rotation barriers in combination with a solvation model that yields correct protein rotational diffusion times, we find that properly accounting for anisotropic protein tumbling is an important factor to improve the match between NMR and MD in terms of methyl axis order parameters, spectral densities, and relaxation rates. The best agreement with the experimentally measured relaxation rates is obtained by a posteriori fitting the appropriate internal time correlation functions, truncated by anisotropic overall tumbling. In addition, MD simulations led us to account for a hitherto unrealized artifact in deuterium relaxation experiments arising from strong coupling for leucine residues in uniformly 13C-enriched proteins. For T4L, the improved analysis reduced the RMSD between MD and NMR derived methyl axis order parameters from 0.19 to 0.11. At the level of the spectral density functions, the improvements allow us to extract the most accurate parameters that describe protein side-chain dynamics. Further improvement is challenging not only due to force field and sampling limitations in MD, but also due to inherent limitations of the Lipari-Szabo model to capture complex dynamics.

The membranes of the first protocells on the early Earth were likely self-assembled from fatty acids. A major challenge in understanding how protocells could have arisen and withstood changes in their environment is that fatty acid membranes are unstable in solutions containing high concentrations of salt (such as would have been prevalent in early oceans) or divalent cations (which would have been required for RNA catalysis). To test whether the inclusion of amino acids addresses this problem, we coupled direct techniques of cryoelectron microscopy and fluorescence microscopy with techniques of NMR spectroscopy, centrifuge filtration assays, and turbidity measurements. We find that a set of unmodified, prebiotic amino acids binds to prebiotic fatty acid membranes and that a subset stabilizes membranes in the presence of salt and Mg2+. Furthermore, we find that final concentrations of the amino acids need not be high to cause these effects; membrane stabilization persists after dilution as would have occurred during the rehydration of dried or partially dried pools. In addition to providing a means to stabilize protocell membranes, our results address the challenge of explaining how proteins could have become colocalized with membranes. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, and our results are consistent with a positive feedback loop in which amino acids bound to self-assembled fatty acid membranes, resulting in membrane stabilization and leading to more binding in turn. High local concentrations of molecular building blocks at the surface of fatty acid membranes may have aided the eventual formation of proteins.

Internal cavities are important elements in protein structure, dynamics, stability and function. Here we use NMR spectroscopy to investigate the binding of molecular oxygen (O2) to cavities in a well-studied model for ligand binding, the L99A mutant of T4 lysozyme. On increasing the O2 concentration to 8.9 mM, changes in 1H, 15N, and 13C chemical shifts and signal broadening were observed specifically for backbone amide and side chain methyl groups located around the two hydrophobic cavities of the protein. O2-induced longitudinal relaxation enhancements for amide and methyl protons could be adequately accounted for by paramagnetic dipolar relaxation. These data provide the first experimental demonstration that O2 binds specifically to the hydrophobic, and not the hydrophilic cavities, in a protein. Molecular dynamics simulations visualized the rotational and translational motions of O2 in the cavities, as well as the binding and egress of O2, suggesting that the channel consisting of helices D, E, G, H, and J could be the potential gateway for ligand binding to the protein. Due to strong paramagnetic relaxation effects, O2 gas-pressure NMR measurements can detect hydrophobic cavities when populated to as little as 1%, and thereby provide a general and highly sensitive method for detecting oxygen binding in proteins.

Biliverdin reductase B (BLVRB) is a newly identified cellular redox regulator that catalyzes the NADPH-dependent reduction of multiple substrates. Through mass spectrometry analysis, we identified high levels of BLVRB in mature red blood cells, highlighting the importance of BLVRB in redox regulation. The BLVRB conformational changes that occur during conezyme/substrate binding and the role of dynamics in BLVRB function, however, remain unknown. Through a combination of NMR, kinetics, and isothermal titration calorimetry studies, we determined that BLVRB binds its coenzyme 500-fold more tightly than its substrate. While the active site of apo BLVRB is highly dynamic on multiple timescales, active site dynamics are largely quenched within holo BLVRB, in which dynamics are redistributed to other regions of the enzyme. We show that a single point mutation of Arg78➔Ala leads to both an increase in active site micro-millisecond motions and an increase in the microscopic rate constants of coenzyme binding. This demonstrates that altering BLVRB active site dynamics can directly cause a change in functional characteristics. Our studies thus address the solution behavior of apo and holo BLVRB and identify a role of enzyme dynamics in coenzyme binding.

Although many proteins possess a distinct folded structure lying at a minimum in a funneled free energy landscape, thermal energy causes any protein to continuously access lowly populated excited states. The existence of excited states is an integral part of biological function. Although transitions into the excited states may lead to protein misfolding and aggregation, little structural information is currently available for them. Here, we show how NMR spectroscopy, coupled with pressure perturbation, brings these elusive species to light. As pressure acts to favor states with lower partial molar volume, NMR follows the ensuing change in the equilibrium spectroscopically, with residue-specific resolution. For T4 lysozyme L99A, relaxation dispersion NMR was used to follow the increase in population of a previously identified “invisible” folded state with pressure, as this is driven by the reduction in cavity volume by the flipping-in of a surface aromatic group. Furthermore, multiple partly disordered excited states were detected at equilibrium using pressure-dependent H/D exchange NMR spectroscopy. Here, unfolding reduced partial molar volume by the removal of empty internal cavities and packing imperfections through subglobal and global unfolding. A close correspondence was found for the distinct pressure sensitivities of various parts of the protein and the amount of internal cavity volume that was lost in each unfolding event. The free energies and populations of excited states allowed us to determine the energetic penalty of empty internal protein cavities to be 36 cal⋅Å−3.