Mutational and structural-based analyses of the osmolyte effect on protein stability

It is known that several naturally occurring substances known as osmolytes increase the conformational stability of proteins. Bolen and co-worker proposed the osmophobic theory, which asserts the osmolyte effect occurs because of an unfavorable interaction of osmolytes mainly with the protein backbone, based on the results on the transfer Gibbs energy of amino acids (Deltag) Bolen and Baskakov (2001) J. Mol. Biol. 310, 955-963]. In this paper, we report the effect of sarcosine on the conformational stability (DeltaG) of RNase Sa (96 residues and one disulfide bond) and four mutant proteins. The thermal denaturation curves for RNase Sa in sarcosine fitted a two-state model on nonlinear least-squares analysis. All the RNase Sa proteins were stabilized by sarcosine. For example, the increase in stability of the wild-type protein in 4 M sarcosine due to the osmolyte effect (Delta(o)DeltaG) is 3.2 kcal/mol. Mutational analysis of the osmolyte effect indicated that the changed Delta(o)DeltaG values upon mutation (Delta(m)Delta(o)DeltaG), as estimated from the Deltag values, are similar to the experimental values. Structural-based analysis of the osmolyte effect was also performed using model denatured structures: (a) a fully extended model (single chain) with no disulfide bond, (b) two-part, unfolded models (two chains) with a disulfide bond constructed through molecular dynamic (MD) simulation, and (c) a two-part, folded model (two chains). The two-part, unfolded models were expected to be more suitable as denatured structures. The Delta(o)DeltaG values calculated using the two-part, unfolded models were more consistent with experimental values than those calculated using the fully extended and two-part, folded models. This suggests that MD simulation is useful for testing denatured structures. These results indicate that the osmophobic theory can explain the osmolyte effect on protein stability.