Parkinson?¦s disease (PD) is a devastating and an intricate complex neurological disorder that results from the progressive degeneration of nerve cells in Substantia nigra that controls movement. The pathological hallmark of PD is the formation of insoluble protein aggregates known as lewey bodies. Alpha-synuclein is the major constituent of these fibrillar structures. Alpha-synuclein a 140 ami...

Parkinson?¦s disease (PD) is a devastating and an intricate complex neurological disorder that results from the progressive degeneration of nerve cells in Substantia nigra that controls movement. The pathological hallmark of PD is the formation of insoluble protein aggregates known as lewey bodies. Alpha-synuclein is the major constituent of these fibrillar structures. Alpha-synuclein a 140 ami...

in this study, the effect of the secondary structure of the protein on the acid strength of three structures of random (r), alpha helix (α) and beta sheet (b) were investigated theoretically. these structures are related to the cationic amino acids of histidine and lysine in the polypeptide chain of eight-glycine residue. computational methods at the hf, b3lyp, x3lyp and m05-2x levels in the ga...

We demonstrate a calculated alpha-helix peptide folding energy landscape which accurately simulates the first experimentally measured alpha-helix melting energy landscape. We examine a 21-amino acid, mainly polyalanine peptide and calculate the free energy along the Psi Ramachandran angle secondary folding coordinate. The experimental free energy landscape was determined using UV resonance Rama...

The GXXXG motif is a frequently occurring sequence of residues that is known to favor helix-helix interactions in membrane proteins. Here we show that the GXXXG motif is also prevalent in soluble proteins whose structures have been determined. Some 152 proteins from a non-redundant PDB set contain at least one alpha-helix with the GXXXG motif, 41 +/- 9% more than expected if glycine residues we...

Although protein structures are primarily encoded by their sequences, they are also critically dependent on environmental factors such as solvents and interactions with other molecules. Here we investigate how the folding-energy landscape of a short peptide is altered by interactions with another peptide, by performing atomistic replica-exchange molecular dynamics simulations of polyalanines in...

The cAMP receptor protein (CRP) of Escherichia coli is a dimer of a two-domain subunit. It requires binding of cAMP for a conformational change in order to function as a site-specific DNA-binding protein that regulates gene activity. The hinge region connecting the cAMP-binding domain to the DNA-binding domain is involved in the cAMP-induced allosteric change. We studied the structural changes ...

The equilibrium structural ensemble of a 20-residue polyglutamic acid peptide (E(20)) was studied with FRET, circular dichroism, and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. A FRET donor, o-aminobenzamide, and acceptor, 3-nitrotyrosine, were introduced at the N- and C-termini, respectively. Circular dichroism, steady state FRET, and time-resolved FRET measurements were employed to characterize the ...