Faculty Publications

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  • Item
    Preferential binding affinity of ions and their effect on structure and dynamics of water near antimicrobial peptide
    (Elsevier B.V., 2021) Singh, O.; Chakraborty, D.
    Water containing dissolved salts is often found to play important roles in many chemical and biological processes. They affect the stability of the amino acids and proteins by altering the liquid water structure. The formation of a mixture of non-uniform density regions in liquid water; commonly known as Low-density water and High-density water is a well-known fact experimentally; which lends uniqueness to the ubiquitous water. The behavior of these different types of water at the interface and the bulk region of the biomolecules around the hydrophobic and hydrophilic residues under the influence of different alkali metal ions, such as LiCl, NaCl, and KCl is an important unexplored question in understanding of many biomolecular processes. To address this, we carried out MD simulation of antimicrobial peptide (PDB ID: 5Z32) for two different model potentials (CHARMM-SPC/E and AMBER-TIP4P) and performed the structural analysis of water in terms of the radial distribution function, number of hydrogen bonds, orientation, tetrahedral order parameter, voids analysis to analyze the related dynamical properties like preferential binding affinity, diffusion, hydrogen bond dynamics, entropy. The water molecules around the hydrophilic environment are found to be more disruptive containing more broken hydrogen bonds in comparison to the hydrophobic environment. It is also found that the water molecules present near the protein surface are of low density and that near the bulk is of high density. This leads to the higher self-diffusion coefficient of the water molecules and less hydrogen bond lifetime at the bulk. The maximum difference is found for the solutions containing high charge density, Lithium ions. Lithium ions have a strong preferential binding affinity towards protein surface resulting in strong solvation shells containing more tetrahedral-like water structure which has low diffusion, low entropy, and higher hydrogen bond lifetime. The diffusion of the water molecules, however, increases towards the higher solvation shells. Potassium on the other hand has less preference to live on protein surfaces resulting in similar diffusion values in the bulk and interface water molecules. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.
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    Influence of Ion Specificity and Concentration on the Conformational Transition of Intrinsically Disordered Sheep Prion Peptide
    (John Wiley and Sons Inc, 2022) Singh, O.; Kumar das, B.; Chakraborty, D.
    The structural sensitivity of the intrinsically disordered proteins with the ions has been observed experimentally; however, it is still unclear how the presence of different metal ions affects structural stability. We performed an atomistic molecular dynamics simulation of sheep prion peptide (142–167) in presence of different monovalent, divalent ions at various concentrations to find out the effect of the size, charge, and ionic concentration on the structure of the peptide. It is found that Li+ ions have a higher survival probability compared to Na+, K+, and Mg2+ affecting the solvation structure of the protein leading to the alpha-helix structure. At high concentration, due to the increase in the ion-solvent and counter-ion interactions, the effect of the ions is screened on the surface of the protein and hence no ion specificity is observed. This study demonstrates how ions can be used to regulate the protein structure and function that can help in designing drugs. © 2022 Wiley-VCH GmbH.
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    Understanding the role of water on temperature-dependent structural modifications of SARS CoV-2 main protease binding sites
    (Elsevier B.V., 2022) Venugopal, P.P.; Singh, O.; Chakraborty, D.
    Thermally stable and labile proteases are found in microorganisms. Protease mediates the cleavage of polyproteins in the virus replication and transcription process. 6 µs MD simulations were performed for monomer/dimer SARS CoV-2 main protease system in both SPC/E and mTIP3P water model to analyse the temperature-dependent behaviour of the protein. It is found that maximum conformational changes are observed at 348 K which is near the melting temperature. Network distribution of evolved conformations shows an increase in the number of communities with the rise in the temperature. The global conformation of the protein was found to be intact whereas a local conformational space evolved due to thermal fluctuations. The global conformational change in the free energy ΔΔG value for the monomer and the dimer between 278 K and 383 K is found to be 2.51 and 2.10 kJ/mol respectively. A detailed analysis was carried out on the effect of water on the temperature-dependent structural modifications of four binding pockets of SARS CoV-2 main protease namely, catalytic dyad, substrate-binding site, dimerization site and allosteric site. It is found that the water structure around the binding sites is altered with temperature. The water around the dimer sites is more ordered than the monomer sites regardless of the rise in temperature due to structural rigidity. The energy expense of binding the small molecules at substrate binding is less compared to the allosteric site. The water-water hydrogen bond lifetime is found to be more near the cavity of His41. Also, it is observed that mTIP3P water molecules have a similar effect to that of SPC/E water molecules on the main protease. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.
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    Exploring the multiple conformational states of RNA genome through interhelical dynamics and network analysis
    (Elsevier Inc., 2022) Singh, O.; Venugopal, P.P.; Mathur, A.; Chakraborty, D.
    The structural variation of RNA is often very transient and can be easily missed in experiments. Molecular dynamics simulation studies along with network analysis can be an effective tool to identify prominent conformations of such dynamic biomolecular systems. Here we describe a method to effectively sample different RNA conformations at six different temperatures based on the changes in the interhelical orientations. This method gives the information about prominent states of the RNA as well as the probability of the existence of different conformations and their interconnections during the process of evolution. In the case of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, the change of prominent structures was found to be faster at 333 K as compared to higher temperatures due to the formation of the non-native base pairs. ΔΔG calculated between 288 K and 363 K are found to be 10.31 kcal/mol (88 nt) considering the contribution from the multiple states of the RNA which agrees well with the experimentally reported denaturation energy for E. coli α mRNA pseudoknot (∼16 kcal/mol, 112 nt) determined by calorimetry/UV hyperchromicity and human telomerase RNA telomerase (4.5–6.6 kcal/mol, 54 nt) determined by FRET analysis. © 2022 Elsevier Inc.