A New Efficient Method for Generating Conformations of Unfolded Proteins with Diverse Main-Chain Dihedral-Angle Distributions

A new method for generating polypeptide-chain conformations has been developed for studying structural characteristics of unfolded proteins. It enables us to generate a large number of conformations very rapidly by avoiding atomic collisions efficiently with the use of main-chain dihedral-angle distributions derived from a crystal-structure database of proteins. In addition, combining main-chain dihedral-angle distributions for the amino acid residues incorporated in different secondary structures, we can obtain diverse conformational ensembles with different structural features. Structural characteristics of proteins denatured in high-concentration denaturant solution were analyzed by comparing predictions from this method with results from solution X-ray scattering (SXS) measurement. Analysis of the dependence of the mean square radius (R sq) of protein on the number of residues and the shape of its Kratky profile has confirmed that the highly denaturing solvent serves as a good solvent in accordance with previous reports. It was also found that, in order for a conformational ensemble to reproduce experimental data, the percentage in which main-chain dihedral angles are found in the α region must be in the range of 20–40%. It agrees with studies on the 3 J HNα coupling constant using the multidimensional NMR method. These results confirm that our method for generating diverse conformations of polypeptide chains is very useful to the conformational analysis of unfolded protein, because it enables us to analyze comprehensively both of the local structural features obtained from NMR and the global ones obtained from SXS.