What is it about?
Water around the protein and the water we drink are very different. Ever wonder how this '21th amino acid', the bound water control protein stability? The hunch is that more restricted the water dynamics is, more stable is the protein. It's not like that. Taking crowded environment, we showed that the stability of protein and water could only be understood in terms of individual entropy and enthaly of stability rather than overall stability and it's more complex than we thought.
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Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Protein stability is one of the oldest and debated topic of fundamental bioscience. Here, we give a new outlook to understand it. Proteins are evolved to behave in crowded milieu, and there are many findings of protein stability on crowded milieu (like negative entropy effect and entropy enthalpy compensation) that so far could not be explained. This story explains most of these.
Perspectives
This problem basically handles the age-old problem of protein stability and provides some fresh perspective. We now know how to understand the role of associated water in controlling protein stability. It should be a generic phenomenon, not limited to the protein stability in crowded environment. It also explains the protein-specific effect on the stability.We hope this opens up new avenue to understand other cellular phenomenon in terms of water structure modulation.
Dr. Nilimesh Das
Harvard University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Associated Water Dynamics Might Be a Key Factor Affecting Protein Stability in the Crowded Milieu, The Journal of Physical Chemistry B, April 2023, American Chemical Society (ACS),
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcb.2c09043.
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