Electrostatic contributions to T4 lysozyme stability: solvent-exposed charges versus semi-buried salt bridges

We carried our Poisson-Boltzmann (PB) calculations for the effects of charge reversal at five exposed sites (K16E, R119E, K135E, K147E, and R154E) and charge neutralization and proton titration of the H31-D70 semi-buried salt bridge on the stability of T4 lysozyme. Instead of the widely used solvent-exclusion (SE) surface, we used the van der Waals (vdW) surface as the boundary between the protein and solvent dielectrics (a protocol established in our earlier study on charge mutations in barnase). By including residual charge-charge interactions in the unfolded state, the five charge reversal mutations were found to have DeltaDeltaG(unfold) from -1.6 to 1.3 kcal/mol. This indicates that the variable effects of charge reversal observed by Matthews and co-workers are not unexpected. The H31N, D70N, and H31N/D70N mutations were found to destabilize the protein by 2.9, 1.3, and 1.6 kcal/mol, and the pK(a) values of H31 and D70 were shifted to 9.4 and 0.6, respectively. These results are in good accord with experimental data of Dahlquist and co-workers. In contrast, if the SE surface were used, the H31N/D70N mutant would be more stable than the wild-type protein by 1.3 kcal/mol. From these and additional results for 27 charge mutations on five other proteins, we conclude that 1) the popular view that electrostatic interactions are generally destabilizing may have been based on overestimated desolvation cost as a result of using the SE surface as the dielectric boundary; and 2) while solvent-exposed charges may not reliably contribute to protein stability, semi-buried salt bridges can provide significant stabilization.