Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the etiological agent of COVID-19, is considered a zoonotic pathogen mainly transmitted human to human. Few reports indicate that pets ...may be exposed to the virus. The present report describes a cat suffering from severe respiratory distress and thrombocytopenia living with a family with several members affected by COVID-19. Clinical signs of the cat prompted humanitarian euthanasia and a detailed postmortem investigation to assess whether a COVID-19–like disease was causing the condition. Necropsy results showed the animal suffered from feline hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and severe pulmonary edema and thrombosis. SARS-CoV-2 RNA was only detected in nasal swab, nasal turbinates, and mesenteric lymph node, but no evidence of histopathological lesions compatible with a viral infection were detected. The cat seroconverted against SARS-CoV-2, further evidencing a productive infection in this animal. We conclude that the animal had a subclinical SARS-CoV-2 infection concomitant to an unrelated cardiomyopathy that led to euthanasia.
Substantial improvements in enzyme activity demand multiple mutations at spatially proximal positions in the active site. Such mutations, however, often exhibit unpredictable epistatic (non-additive) ...effects on activity. Here we describe FuncLib, an automated method for designing multipoint mutations at enzyme active sites using phylogenetic analysis and Rosetta design calculations. We applied FuncLib to two unrelated enzymes, a phosphotriesterase and an acetyl-CoA synthetase. All designs were active, and most showed activity profiles that significantly differed from the wild-type and from one another. Several dozen designs with only 3–6 active-site mutations exhibited 10- to 4,000-fold higher efficiencies with a range of alternative substrates, including hydrolysis of the toxic organophosphate nerve agents soman and cyclosarin and synthesis of butyryl-CoA. FuncLib is implemented as a web server (http://FuncLib.weizmann.ac.il); it circumvents iterative, high-throughput experimental screens and opens the way to designing highly efficient and diverse catalytic repertoires.
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•FuncLib is a new method that designs diverse multipoint mutants in enzyme active sites•Designs are efficient and functionally diverse, bypassing high-throughput screening•Designs exhibit up to 4 orders of magnitude improvement in several activities•FuncLib is implemented as a web-server (http://funclib.weizmann.ac.il)
Khersonsky et al. present FuncLib, an automated method for designing catalytic repertoires using phylogenetic analysis and Rosetta design calculations. FuncLib resulted in efficient enzymes, including new hydrolases with the potential to treat nerve agent poisoning.
Computational modeling offers a new insight about the electron transfer pathway in heme peroxidases. Available crystal structures have revealed an intriguing arrangement of the heme propionate side ...chains in heme−heme and heme−substrate complexes. By means of mixed quantum mechanical/molecular mechanics calculations, we study the involvement of these propionate groups into the substrate oxidation in ascorbate peroxidase and into the heme to heme electron transfer in bacterial cytochrome c peroxidase. By selectively turning on/off different quantum regions, we obtain the electron transfer pathway which directly involves the porphyrin ring and the heme propionates. Furthermore, in ascorbate peroxidase the presence of the substrate appears to be crucial for the activation of the electron transfer channel. The results might represent a general motif for electron transfer from/to the heme group and change our view for the propionate side chains as simple electrostatic binding anchors. We name the new mechanism “the propionate e-pathway”.
Modeling the dynamic nature of protein-ligand binding with atomistic simulations is one of the main challenges in computational biophysics, with important implications in the drug design process. ...Although in the past few years hardware and software advances have significantly revamped the use of molecular simulations, we still lack a fast and accurate ab initio description of the binding mechanism in complex systems, available only for up-to-date techniques and requiring several hours or days of heavy computation. Such delay is one of the main limiting factors for a larger penetration of protein dynamics modeling in the pharmaceutical industry. Here we present a game-changing technology, opening up the way for fast reliable simulations of protein dynamics by combining an adaptive reinforcement learning procedure with Monte Carlo sampling in the frame of modern multi-core computational resources. We show remarkable performance in mapping the protein-ligand energy landscape, being able to reproduce the full binding mechanism in less than half an hour, or the active site induced fit in less than 5 minutes. We exemplify our method by studying diverse complex targets, including nuclear hormone receptors and GPCRs, demonstrating the potential of using the new adaptive technique in screening and lead optimization studies.
Abstract
Antigens presented on the cell surface have been subjected to multiple biological processes. Among them, C-terminal antigen processing constitutes one of the main bottlenecks of the peptide ...presentation pathways, as it delimits the peptidome that will be subjected downstream. Here, we present NetCleave, an open-source and retrainable algorithm for the prediction of the C-terminal antigen processing for both MHC-I and MHC-II pathways. NetCleave architecture consists of a neural network trained on 46 different physicochemical descriptors of the cleavage site amino acids. Our results demonstrate that prediction of C-terminal antigen processing achieves high accuracy on MHC-I (AUC of 0.91), while it remains challenging for MHC-II (AUC of 0.66). Moreover, we evaluated the performance of NetCleave and other prediction tools for the evaluation of four independent immunogenicity datasets (H2-Db, H2-Kb, HLA-A*02:01 and HLA-B:07:02). Overall, we demonstrate that NetCleave stands out as one of the best algorithms for the prediction of C-terminal processing, and we provide one of the first evidence that C-terminal processing predictions may help in the discovery of immunogenic peptides.
We describe large scale ab initio quantum chemical and mixed quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) methods for studying enzymatic reactions. First, technical aspects of the methodology are ...reviewed, including the hybrid density functional theory (DFT) methods that are typically employed for the QM aspect of the calculations, and various approaches to defining the interface between the QM and MM regions in QM/MM approaches. The modeling of the enzymatic catalytic cycle for three examples--methane monooxygenase, cytochrome P450, and triose phosphate isomerase--are discussed in some depth, followed by a brief summary of other systems that have been investigated by ab initio methods over the past several years. Finally, a discussion of the qualitative and quantitative conclusions concerning enzymatic catalysis that are available from modern ab initio approaches is presented, followed by a conclusion briefly summarizing future prospects.
Steroid receptor drugs have been available for more than half a century, but details of the ligand binding mechanism have remained elusive. We solved X-ray structures of the glucocorticoid and ...mineralocorticoid receptors to identify a conserved plasticity at the helix 6–7 region that extends the ligand binding pocket toward the receptor surface. Since none of the endogenous ligands exploit this region, we hypothesized that it constitutes an integral part of the binding event. Extensive all-atom unbiased ligand exit and entrance simulations corroborate a ligand binding pathway that gives the observed structural plasticity a key functional role. Kinetic measurements reveal that the receptor residence time correlates with structural rearrangements observed in both structures and simulations. Ultimately, our findings reveal why nature has conserved the capacity to open up this region, and highlight how differences in the details of the ligand entry process result in differential evolutionary constraints across the steroid receptors.
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•X-Ray structures of MR and GR reveal a conserved plasticity near helices 6 and 7•Ligand binding simulations provide a functional role to the observed plasticity•Residence time measurements correlate with the proposed binding mechanism•Differences in receptor blueprints promote differential evolutionary constraints
Edman et al. combined X-ray crystallography, computational simulations, and residence time measurements to uncover the ligand entry and exit processes of steroid hormone receptors. Subsequent bioinformatics analyses confirmed that differences in the details of the ligand entry mechanism lead to differential selection pressure across the receptor family.
Recent cryoEM studies elucidated details of the structural basis for the substrate selectivity and translocation of heteromeric amino acid transporters. However, Asc1/CD98hc is the only neutral ...heteromeric amino acid transporter that can function through facilitated diffusion, and the only one that efficiently transports glycine and D-serine, and thus has a regulatory role in the central nervous system. Here we use cryoEM, ligand-binding simulations, mutagenesis, transport assays, and molecular dynamics to define human Asc1/CD98hc determinants for substrate specificity and gain insights into the mechanisms that govern substrate translocation by exchange and facilitated diffusion. The cryoEM structure of Asc1/CD98hc is determined at 3.4-3.8 Å resolution, revealing an inward-facing semi-occluded conformation. We find that Ser 246 and Tyr 333 are essential for Asc1/CD98hc substrate selectivity and for the exchange and facilitated diffusion modes of transport. Taken together, these results reveal the structural bases for ligand binding and transport features specific to human Asc1.
To meet the very specific requirements demanded by industry, proteins must be appropriately tailored. Engineering laccases, to improve the oxidation of small molecules, with applications in multiple ...fields, is, however, a difficult task. Most efforts have concentrated on increasing the redox potential of the enzyme, but in recent work, we have pursued an alternate strategy to engineering these biocatalysts. In particular, we have found that redesigning substrate binding at the T1 pocket, guided by in silico methodologies, to be a more consistent option. In this work, we evaluate the robustness of our computational approach to estimate activity, emphasizing the importance of the binding event in laccase reactivity. Strengths and weaknesses of the protocol are discussed along with its potential for scoring large numbers of protein sequences and thus its significance in protein engineering.
NADPH:protochlorophyllide (Pchlide) oxidoreductase (POR) is a key enzyme of chlorophyll biosynthesis in angiosperms. It is one of few known photoenzymes, which catalyzes the light‐activated ...trans‐reduction of the C17‐C18 double bond of Pchlide's porphyrin ring. Due to the light requirement, dark‐grown angiosperms cannot synthesize chlorophyll. No crystal structure of POR is available, so to improve understanding of the protein's three‐dimensional structure, its dimerization, and binding of ligands (both the cofactor NADPH and substrate Pchlide), we computationally investigated the sequence and structural relationships among homologous proteins identified through database searches. The results indicate that α4 and α7 helices of monomers form the interface of POR dimers. On the basis of conserved residues, we predicted 11 functionally important amino acids that play important roles in POR binding to NADPH. Structural comparison of available crystal structures revealed that they participate in formation of binding pockets that accommodate the Pchlide ligand, and that five atoms of the closed tetrapyrrole are involved in non‐bonding interactions. However, we detected no clear pattern in the physico‐chemical characteristics of the amino acids they interact with. Thus, we hypothesize that interactions of these atoms in the Pchlide porphyrin ring are important to hold the ligand within the POR binding site. Analysis of Pchlide binding in POR by molecular docking and PELE simulations revealed that the orientation of the nicotinamide group is important for Pchlide binding. These findings highlight the complexity of interactions of porphyrin‐containing ligands with proteins, and we suggest that fit‐inducing processes play important roles in POR‐Pchlide interactions.
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