Structural Changes in Halophilic and Non-halophilic Proteases in Response to Chaotropic Reagents

Halophilic enzymes have been established for their stability and catalytic abilities under harsh operational conditions. These have been documented to withstand denaturation at high temperature, pH, organic solvents, and chaotropic agents. However, this stability is modulated by salt. The present study targets an important aspect in understanding protein–urea/GdmCl interactions using proteases from halophilic Bacillus sp. EMB9 and non-halophilic subtilisin (Carlsberg) from Bacillus licheniformis as model systems. While, halophilic protease containing 1 % (w/v) NaCl (0.17 M) retained full activity towards urea (8 M), non-halophilic protease lost about 90 % activity under similar conditions. The secondary and tertiary structure were lost in non-halophilic but preserved for halophilic protein. This effect could be due to the possible charge screening and shielding of the protein surface by Ca²⁺ and Na⁺ ions rendering it stable against denaturation. The dialyzed halophilic protease almost behaved like the non-halophilic counterpart. Incorporation of NaCl (up to 5 %, w/v or 0.85 M) in dialyzed EMB9 protease containing urea/GdmCl, not only helped regain of proteolytic activity but also evaded denaturing action. Deciphering the basis of this salt modulated stability amidst a denaturing milieu will provide guidelines and templates for engineering stable proteins/enzymes for biotechnological applications.     

Identification of a halophilic α-amylase gene from Escherichia coli JM109 and characterization of the recombinant enzyme

A halophilic α-amylase (EAMY) gene from Escherichia coli JM109 was overexpressed in E. coli XL10-Gold and the recombinant protein was purified and characterized. The activity of the EAMY depended on the presence of both Na⁺ and Cl^?, and had maximum activity in 2 M NaCl at 55 °C and pH 7.0. When 2 % (w/v) soluble starch was used as substrate, the specific activity was about 1,090 U mg^?1 protein. This is the first report on identifying a halophilic α-amylase with high specific activity from non-halophilic bacteria.     

Haloadaptation: insights from comparative modeling studies of halophilic archaeal DHFRs

Proteins of halophilic archaea function in high-salt concentrations that inactivate or precipitate homologous proteins from non-halophilic species. Haloadaptation and the mechanism behind the phenomenon are not yet fully understood. In order to obtain useful information, homology modeling studies of dihydrofolate reductases (DHFRs) from halophilic archaea were performed that led to the construction of structural models. These models were subjected to energy minimization, structural evaluation and analysis. Complementary approaches concerning calculations of the amino acid composition and visual inspection of the surfaces and cores of the models, as well as calculations of electrostatic surface potentials, in comparison to non-halophilic DHFRs were also performed. The results provide evidence that sheds some light on the phenomenon of haloadaptation: DHFRs from halophilic archaea may maintain their fold, in high-salt concentrations, by sharing highly negatively charged surfaces and weak hydrophobic cores.     

Protein attributes contribute to halo-stability, bioinformatics approach

Halophile proteins can tolerate high salt concentrations. Understanding halophilicity features is the first step toward engineering halostable crops. To this end, we examined protein features contributing to the halo-toleration of halophilic organisms. We compared more than 850 features for halophilic and non-halophilic proteins with various screening, clustering, decision tree, and generalized rule induction models to search for patterns that code for halo-toleration. Up to 251 protein attributes selected by various attribute weighting algorithms as important features contribute to halo-stability; from them 14 attributes selected by 90% of models and the count of hydrogen gained the highest value (1.0) in 70% of attribute weighting models, showing the importance of this attribute in feature selection modeling. The other attributes mostly were the frequencies of di-peptides. No changes were found in the numbers of groups when K-Means and TwoStep clustering modeling were performed on datasets with or without feature selection filtering. Although the depths of induced trees were not high, the accuracies of trees were higher than 94% and the frequency of hydrophobic residues pointed as the most important feature to build trees. The performance evaluation of decision tree models had the same values and the best correctness percentage recorded with the Exhaustive CHAID and CHAID models. We did not find any significant difference in the percent of correctness, performance evaluation, and mean correctness of various decision tree models with or without feature selection. For the first time, we analyzed the performance of different screening, clustering, and decision tree algorithms for discriminating halophilic and non-halophilic proteins and the results showed that amino acid composition can be used to discriminate between halo-tolerant and halo-sensitive proteins.     

Molecular bases of protein halotolerance

Halophilic proteins are stable and function at high salt concentration. Understanding how these molecules maintain their fold stable and avoid aggregation under harsh conditions is of great interest for biotechnological applications. This mini-review describes what is known about the molecular determinants of protein halotolerance. Comparisons between the sequences of halophilic/non-halophilic homologous protein pairs indicated that Asp and Glu are significantly more frequent, while Lys, Ile and Leu are less frequent in halophilic proteins. Homologous halophilic and non-halophilic proteins have similar overall structure, secondary structure content, and number of residues involved in the formation of H-bonds. On the other hand, on the halophilic protein surface, a decrease of nonpolar residues and an increase of charged residues are observed. Particularly, halophilic adaptation correlates with an increase of Asp and Glu, compensated by a decrease of basic residues, mainly Lys, on protein surface. A thermodynamic model, that provides a reliable explanation of the salt effect on the conformational stability of globular proteins, is presented.     

Halophilic enzymes: proteins with a grain of salt

Halophilic enzymes, while performing identical enzymatic functions as their non-halophilic counterparts, have been shown to exhibit substantially different properties, among them the requirement for high salt concentrations, in the 1-4 M range, for activity and stability, and a high excess of acidic over basic amino residues. The following communication reviews the functional and structural properties of two proteins isolated from the extremely halophilic archaeon Haloarcula marismortui: the enzyme malate-dehydrogenase (hMDH) and the 2Fe-2S protein ferredoxin. It is argued that the high negative surface charge of halophilic proteins makes them more soluble and renders them more flexible at high salt concentrations, conditions under which non-halophilic proteins tend to aggregate and become rigid. This high surface charge is neutralized mainly by tightly bound water dipoles. The requirement of high salt concentration for the stabilization of halophilic enzymes, on the other hand, is due to a low affinity binding of the salt to specific sites on the surface of the folded polypeptide, thus stabilizing the active conformation of the protein.     

Potentiality of a new compound for in vitro differentiation between halophilic and non-halophilic vibrios

Sensitivity of 21 halophilic vibrios and 16 clinical isolates of non-halophilic vibrios was determined against a new possible antivibrio agent, a pyrimidine analogue, 4, 6-dimethylpyrimidine -2-thiol (4,6-DMPT). It appeared to be a vibriocidal agent, having a mean MIC and MBC of 32 microg/ml for halophilic strains and 64 microg/ml for non-halophilic strains and an LD50 of 300 mg/Kg body weight of mice. Thus, 4,6-DMPT may help an in vitro distinction between halophilic and non-halophilic vibrios. Sensitivity of these strains was also studied with respect to pteridine, crystal violet and Tween 80 hydrolysis as further markers distinguishing between these 2 groups which could also be differentiated by their growth on TCBS or/and CLED media.     

Unique amino acid composition of proteins in halophilic bacteria

The amino acid compositions of proteins from halophilic archaea were compared with those from non-halophilic mesophiles and thermophiles, in terms of the protein surface and interior, on a genome-wide scale. As we previously reported for proteins from thermophiles, a biased amino acid composition also exists in halophiles, in which an abundance of acidic residues was found on the protein surface as compared to the interior. This general feature did not seem to depend on the individual protein structures, but was applicable to all proteins encoded within the entire genome. Unique protein surface compositions are common in both halophiles and thermophiles. Statistical tests have shown that significant surface compositional differences exist among halophiles, non-halophiles, and thermophiles, while the interior composition within each of the three types of organisms does not significantly differ. Although thermophilic proteins have an almost equal abundance of both acidic and basic residues, a large excess of acidic residues in halophilic proteins seems to be compensated by fewer basic residues. Aspartic acid, lysine, asparagine, alanine, and threonine significantly contributed to the compositional differences of halophiles from meso- and thermophiles. Among them, however, only aspartic acid deviated largely from the expected amount estimated from the dinucleotide composition of the genomic DNA sequence of the halophile, which has an extremely high G+C content (68%). Thus, the other residues with large deviations (Lys, Ala, etc.) from their non-halophilic frequencies could have arisen merely as "dragging effects" caused by the compositional shift of the DNA, which would have changed to increase principally the fraction of aspartic acid alone.     

Prediction of Beta-Turn in Protein Using E-SSpred and Support Vector Machine

β-Turn is a secondary protein structure type that plays an important role in protein configuration and function. Here, we introduced an approach of β-turn prediction that used the support vector machine (SVM) algorithm combined with predicted secondary structure information. The secondary structure information was obtained by using E-SSpred, a new secondary protein structure prediction method. A 7-fold cross validation based on the benchmark dataset of 426 non-homologous protein chains was used to evaluate the performance of our method. The prediction results broke the 80% Q _total barrier and achieved Q _total = 80.9%, MCC = 0.44, and Q _predicted higher 0.9% when compared with the best method. The results in our research are coincident with the conclusion that β-turn prediction accuracy can be improved by inclusion of secondary structure information.     

Structural and biochemical properties of an extreme ‘salt-loving’ proteasome activating nucleotidase from the archaeon Haloferax volcanii

In eukaryotes, the 26S proteasome degrades ubiquitinylated proteins in an ATP-dependent manner. Archaea mediate a form of post-translational modification of proteins termed sampylation that resembles ubiquitinylation. Sampylation was identified in Haloferax volcanii, a moderate halophilic archaeon that synthesizes homologs of 26S proteasome subunits including 20S core particles and regulatory particle triple-A ATPases (Rpt)-like proteasome-associated nucleotidases (PAN-A/1 and PAN-B/2). To determine whether sampylated proteins associate with the Rpt subunit homologs, PAN-A/1 was purified to homogeneity from Hfx. volcanii and analyzed for its subunit stoichiometry, nucleotide-hydrolyzing activity and binding to sampylated protein targets. PAN-A/1 was found to be associated as a dodecamer (630 kDa) with a configuration in TEM suggesting a complex of two stacked hexameric rings. PAN-A/1 had high affinity for ATP (K _m of ~0.44 mM) and hydrolyzed this nucleotide with a specific activity of 0.33 ± 0.1 μmol Pi/h per mg protein and maximum at 42 °C. PAN-A1 was stabilized by 2 M salt with a decrease in activity at lower concentrations of salt that correlated with dissociation of the dodecamer into trimers to monomers. Binding of PAN-A/1 to a sampylated protein was demonstrated by modification of a far Western blotting technique (derived from the standard Western blot method to detect protein–protein interaction in vitro) for halophilic proteins. Overall, our results support a model in which sampylated proteins associate with the PAN-A/1 AAA+ ATPase in proteasome-mediated proteolysis and/or protein remodeling and provide a method for assay of halophilic protein–protein interactions.     

Molecular adaptation: the malate dehydrogenase from the extreme halophilic bacterium Salinibacter ruber behaves like a non-halophilic protein

Malate dehydrogenase from the extreme halophilic bacterium, Salinibacter ruber (Sr MalDH) was purified and characterised as a tetramer by sedimentation velocity measurements, showing the enzyme belongs to the LDH-like group of MalDHs. In contrast to most other halophilic enzymes, which unfold when incubated at low salt concentration, Sr MalDH is completely stable in absence of salt. Its amino acid composition does not display the strong acidic character specific of halophilic proteins. The enzyme displays a strong KCl-concentration dependent variation in K(m) for oxaloacetate, but not for the NADH co-factor. Its activity is reduced by high salt concentration, but remains sufficient for the enzyme to sustain catalysis at approximately 30% of its maximal rates in 3 M KCl. The properties of the protein were compared with those from other LDH-like MalDHs of bacterial and archaeal origins, showing that Sr MalDH in fact behaves like a non-halophilic enzyme.     

Functional implications related to the gene structure of the elongation factor EF-Tu from Halobacterium marismortui.

The primary structure of the gene for the elongation factor EF-Tu from the halophilic archaebacterium Halobacterium marismortui (hEF-Tu) is described. It is the first gene of a halophilic elongation factor EF-Tu to be sequenced. When the sequence of hEF-Tu is compared to that of homologous proteins from other organisms, the highest identity (61%) is found with EF-Tu from Methanococcus vannielii, a non-halophilic archaebacterium. In the search for halophilic characteristics therefore the most appropriate comparison is with the M. vannielii sequence. The excess of acidic amino acid residues in the hEF-Tu sequence (already observed in the composition of other halophilic proteins) results to a large extent from changes of Lys, Asn or Gln to Asp or Glu. A structural analysis algorithm applied to the halophilic sequence places these acidic residues on the surface of the protein. The corresponding residues in the crystal structure of the first domain of EF-Tu from E. coli (the only EF-Tu structure available) are grouped in patches on the protein surface, in each of which several residues that may be far apart in the sequence come quite close to each other in the tertiary structure.     

On the composition and nature of the bulk protein of extremely halophilic bacteria

Summary Comparative studies have been carried out on the amino acid composition of the bulk protein of the two main types of extremely halophilic bacteria and their non-halophilic, bacteriological counterparts. The protein of all the extreme halophiles tested was relatively high in aspartic and glutamic acids and low in lysine and alanine. The results have furnished a basis for a discussion of the molecular mechanisms which might be involved in the evolution of an extremely halophilic organism from a non-halophilic organism.Research Fellow of The Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities.     

Prediction of flexible/rigid regions from protein sequences using k-spaced amino acid pairs

Background

Traditionally, it is believed that the native structure of a protein corresponds to a global minimum of its free energy. However, with the growing number of known tertiary (3D) protein structures, researchers have discovered that some proteins can alter their structures in response to a change in their surroundings or with the help of other proteins or ligands. Such structural shifts play a crucial role with respect to the protein function. To this end, we propose a machine learning method for the prediction of the flexible/rigid regions of proteins (referred to as FlexRP); the method is based on a novel sequence representation and feature selection. Knowledge of the flexible/rigid regions may provide insights into the protein folding process and the 3D structure prediction.

Results

The flexible/rigid regions were defined based on a dataset, which includes protein sequences that have multiple experimental structures, and which was previously used to study the structural conservation of proteins. Sequences drawn from this dataset were represented based on feature sets that were proposed in prior research, such as PSI-BLAST profiles, composition vector and binary sequence encoding, and a newly proposed representation based on frequencies of k-spaced amino acid pairs. These representations were processed by feature selection to reduce the dimensionality. Several machine learning methods for the prediction of flexible/rigid regions and two recently proposed methods for the prediction of conformational changes and unstructured regions were compared with the proposed method. The FlexRP method, which applies Logistic Regression and collocation-based representation with 95 features, obtained 79.5% accuracy. The two runner-up methods, which apply the same sequence representation and Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Naïve Bayes classifiers, obtained 79.2% and 78.4% accuracy, respectively. The remaining considered methods are characterized by accuracies below 70%. Finally, the Naïve Bayes method is shown to provide the highest sensitivity for the prediction of flexible regions, while FlexRP and SVM give the highest sensitivity for rigid regions.

Conclusion

A new sequence representation that uses k-spaced amino acid pairs is shown to be the most efficient in the prediction of the flexible/rigid regions of protein sequences. The proposed FlexRP method provides the highest prediction accuracy of about 80%. The experimental tests show that the FlexRP and SVM methods achieved high overall accuracy and the highest sensitivity for rigid regions, while the best quality of the predictions for flexible regions is achieved by the Naïve Bayes method.     

Protein Subcellular Location: The Gap Between Prediction and Experimentation

Newly synthesized proteins in eukaryotic cells can only function well after they are accurately transported to specific organelles. The establishment of protein databases and the development of programs have accelerated the study of protein subcellular locations, but their comparisons and evaluations of the prediction accuracy of subcellular location programs in plants are lacking. In this study, we built a random test set of maize proteins to evaluate the accuracy of six commonly used programs of subcellular locations: iLoc-Plant, Plant-mPLoc, CELLO, WoLF PSORT, SherLoc2, and Predotar. Our results showed that the accuracy of prediction varied greatly depending on the programs and subcellular locations involved. The programs using homology search methods (iLoc-Plant and Plant-mPLoc) performed better than those using feature search methods (CELLO, WoLF PSORT, SherLoc2, and Predotar). In particular, iLoc-Plant achieved an 84.9 % accuracy for proteins whose subcellular locations have been experimentally determined and a 74.3 % accuracy for all of the proteins in the test set. Regarding locations, the highest prediction accuracies for subcellular locations were obtained for the nucleus, followed by the cytoplasm, mitochondria, plastids, endoplasmic reticulum, and vacuoles, while the lowest were obtained for cell membrane, secreted, and multiple-location proteins. We discussed the accuracy of the six programs in this article. This study will assist plant biologists in choosing appropriate programs to predict the location of proteins and provide clues regarding their function, especially for hypothetical or novel proteins.     

Cloning,expression and characterization of a novel cold-active and halophilic xylanase from Zunongwangia profunda

A new xylanase gene (xynA) from the marine microorganism Zunongwangia profunda was identified to encode 374 amino acid residues. Its product (XynA) showed the highest identity (42.78 %) with a xylanase from Bacillus sp. SN5 among the characterized xylanases. XynA exhibited the highest activity at pH 6.5 and 30 °C, retaining 23 and 38 % of the optimal activity at 0 and 5 °C, respectively. XynA was not only cold active, but also halophilic, and both its activity and thermostability could be significantly increased by NaCl, showing the highest activity (180 % of the activity) at 3 M NaCl and retaining nearly 100 % activity at 5 M NaCl, compared to the absence of NaCl. In the presence of 3 M NaCl, the k _cat/K _m value of XynA exhibited a 3.41-fold increase for beechwood xylan compared to no added NaCl, and the residual activity of XynA increased from 23 % (no added NaCl) to 58 % after 1 h incubation at 45 °C. This may be the first report concerning a cold-adapted xylanase from a non-halophilic species that displays the highest activity at a NaCl concentration range from 3 to 5 M. The features of cold activity and salt tolerance suggest the potential application of XynA in the food industry and bioethanol production from marine seaweeds.     

Prediction of Protein Secondary Structure Using Feature Selection and Analysis Approach

The prediction of the secondary structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence is an important step towards the prediction of its three-dimensional structure. However, the accuracy of ab initio secondary structure prediction from sequence is about 80 % currently, which is still far from satisfactory. In this study, we proposed a novel method that uses binomial distribution to optimize tetrapeptide structural words and increment of diversity with quadratic discriminant to perform prediction for protein three-state secondary structure. A benchmark dataset including 2,640 proteins with sequence identity of less than 25 % was used to train and test the proposed method. The results indicate that overall accuracy of 87.8 % was achieved in secondary structure prediction by using ten-fold cross-validation. Moreover, the accuracy of predicted secondary structures ranges from 84 to 89 % at the level of residue. These results suggest that the feature selection technique can detect the optimized tetrapeptide structural words which affect the accuracy of predicted secondary structures.     

Contribution of halophilic nucleoside diphosphate kinase sequence to the heat stability of chimeric molecule

A halophilic nucleoside diphosphate kinase from a moderate halophile, Halomonas sp. 593 (593NDK), was found to be resistant to heat treatment, as indicated by the high level of activity recovery after heating at high temperatures. This is due to reversibility of thermal unfolding, not the high melting temperature, of the protein. The highly homologous NDK from non-halophilic organism, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, showed instability against heat treatment. Chimeric molecules consisting of each half of these two NDKs were constructed and characterized for their heat stability. The results showed that the N-terminal half of 593NDK contributes to the heat stability of the proteins. We discuss the possible reason for the observed difference in resistance to heat treatment between the 593NDK and PaNDK and between two chimeric proteins.