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The relationship between structure and stability has been investigated for the folded forms and the unfolded forms of iso-2 cytochrome c and a variant protein with a stability-enhancing mutation, N52I iso-2. Differential scanning calorimetry has been used to measure the reversible unfolding transitions for the proteins in both heme oxidation states. Reduction potentials have been measured as a function of temperature for the folded forms of the proteins. The combination of measurements of thermal stability and reduction potential gives three sides of a thermodynamic cycle and allows prediction of the reduction potential of the thermally unfolded state. The free energies of electron binding for the thermally unfolded proteins differ from those expected for a fully unfolded protein, suggesting that residual structure modulates the reduction potential. At temperatures near 50 degrees C the N52I mutation has a small but significant effect on oxidation state-sensitive structure in the thermally unfolded protein. Inspection of the high-resolution X-ray crystallographic structures of iso-2 and N52I iso-2 shows that the effects of the N52I mutation and oxidation state on native protein stability are correlated with changes in the mobility of specific polypeptide chain segments and with altered hydrogen bonding involving a conserved water molecule. However, there is no clear explanation of oxidation state or mutation-induced differences in stability of the proteins in terms of observed changes in structure and mobility of the folded forms of the proteins alone.

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N52I iso-2 cytochrome c is a variant of yeast iso-2 cytochrome c in which asparagine substitutes for isoleucine 52 in an alpha helical segment composed of residues 49-56. The N52I substitution results in a significant increase in both stability and cooperativity of equilibrium unfolding, and acts as a "global suppressor" of destabilizing mutations. The equilibrium m-value for denaturant-induced unfolding of N52I iso-2 increases by 3096, a surprisingly large amount for a single residue substitution. The folding/unfolding kinetics for N52I iso-2 have been measured by stopped-flow mixing and by manual mixing, and are compared to the kinetics of folding/unfolding of wild-type protein, iso-2 cytochrome c. The results show that the observable folding rate and the guanidine hydrochloride dependence of the folding rate are the same for iso-2 and N52I iso-2, despite the greater thermodynamic stability of N52I iso-2. Thus, there is no linear free-energy relationship between mutation-induced changes in stability and observable refolding rates. However, for N52I iso-2 the unfolding rate is slower and the guanidine hydrochloride dependence of the unfolding rate is smaller than for iso-2. The differences in the denaturant dependence of the unfolding rates suggest that the N52I substitution decreases the change in the solvent accessible hydrophobic surface between the native state and the transition state. Two aspects of the results are inconsistent with a two-state folding/unfolding mechanism and imply the presence of folding intermediates: (1) observable refolding rate constants calculated from the two-state mechanism by combining equilibrium data and unfolding rate measurements deviate from the observed refolding rate constants; (2) kinetically unresolved signal changes ("burst phase") are observed for both N52I iso-2 and iso-2 refolding. The "burst phase" amplitude is larger for N52I iso-2 than for iso-2, suggesting that the intermediates formed during the "burst phase" are stabilized by the N52I substitution.Keywords: free energy; global suppressors; iso-2 cytochrome c; protein folding; yeastThe stability enhancing properties of the asparagine to isoleucine (N52I) substitution at position 52 in cytochrome c are well known from extensive thermodynamic and X-ray crystallographic studies of N52I iso-1 cytochrome c (Das et al., 1989;Hickey et al., 1991;Berghuis et al., 1994;Komar-Panicucci et al., 1994) and N52I iso-2 cytochrome c (Fig. 1) (McGee et al., 1996). For example, scanning calorimetry measurements of thermal unfolding of N52I iso-2 show that the N52I substitution increases the stability of both the oxidized and reduced forms by 2-3 kcal/mol (McGee et al., 1996). The N52I substitution is also known to act as a "global suppressor" mutation (Shortle & Lin, 1985) by reverting other nonfunctional (second site) mutations to yield functional cytochrome c (Berroteran & Hampsey, 1991). The X-ray crystallographic structures of N52I iso-1 (Berghuis et al., 1994) and N52I iso-2 (McGee et al., 1996) show a substantial ...

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