Mutational effects on protein structure and function

In this thesis several important proteins are investigated from a structural perspective. Some of the proteins are disease related while other have important but not completely characterised functions. The techniques used are general as demonstrated by applications on metabolic proteins (CYP21, CYP11B1, IAPP, ADH3), regulatory proteins (p53, GDNF) and a transporter protein (ANTR1). When the protein CYP21 (steroid 21-hydroxylase) is deficient it causes CAH (congenital adrenal hyperplasia). For this protein, there are about 60 known mutations with characterised clinical phenotypes. Using manual structural analysis we managed to explain the severity of all but one of the mutations. By observing the properties of these mutations we could perform good predictions on, at the time, not classified mutations. For the cancer suppressor protein p53, there are over thousand mutations with known activity. To be able to analyse such a large number of mutations we developed an automated method for evaluation of the mutation effect called PREDMUT. In this method we include twelve different prediction parameters including two energy parameters calculated using an energy minimization procedure. The method manages to differentiate severe mutations from non-severe mutations with 77% accuracy on all possible single base substitutions and with 88% on mutations found in breast cancer patients. The automated prediction was further applied to CYP11B1 (steroid 11-betahydroxylase), which in a similar way as CYP21 causes CAH when deficient. A generalized method applicable to any kind of globular protein was developed. The method was subsequently evaluated on nine additional proteins for which mutants were known with annotated disease phenotypes. This prediction achieved 84% accuracy on CYP11B1 and 81% accuracy in total on the evaluation proteins while leaving 8% as unclassified. By increasing the number of unclassified mutations the accuracy of the remaining mutations could be increased on the evaluation proteins and substantially increase the classification quality as measured by the Matthews correlation coefficient. Servers with predictions for all possible single based substitutions are provided for p53, CYP21 and CYP11B1. The amyloid formation of IAPP (islet amyloid polypeptide) is strongly connected to diabetes and has been studied using both molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo energy minimization. The effects of mutations on the amount and speed of amyloid formation were investigated using three approaches. Applying a consensus of the three methods on a number of interesting mutations, 94% of the mutations could be correctly classified as amyloid forming or not, evaluated with in vitro