Parallel β-sheet secondary structure is stabilized and terminated by interstrand disulfide cross-linking
Aaron M Almeida1, Rebecca Li, Samuel H Gellman
1Department of Chemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1101 University Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA.
None:
Disulfide bonds between Cys residues in adjacent strands of parallel β-sheets are rare among proteins, which suggests that parallel β-sheet structure is not stabilized by such disulfide cross-links. We report experimental results that show, surprisingly, that an interstrand disulfide bond can stabilize parallel β-sheets formed by an autonomously folding peptide in aqueous solution. NMR analysis reveals that parallel β-sheet structure is terminated beyond the disulfide bond, which causes deviation from the extended backbone conformation at one of the Cys residues.
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