Consolidating Critical Binding Determinants by Noncyclic Rearrangement of Protein Secondary Structure

We designed a single-chain variant of the Arc repressor homodimer in which the β strands that contact operator DNA are connected by a hairpin turn and the α helices that form the tetrahelical scaffold of the dimer are attached by a short linker. The designed protein represents a noncyclic permutation of secondary structural elements in another single-chain Arc molecule (Arc-L1-Arc), in which the two subunits are fused by a single linker. The permuted protein binds operator DNA with nanomolar affinity, refolds on the submillisecond time scale, and is as stable as Arc-L1-Arc. The crystal structure of the permuted protein reveals an essentially wild-type fold, demonstrating that crucial folding information is not encoded in the wild-type order of secondary structure. Noncyclic rearrangement of secondary structure may allow grouping of critical activesite residues in other proteins and could be a useful tool for protein design and minimization.