Comparative molecular dynamics simulation studies for determining factors contributing to the thermostability of...

Comparative molecular dynamics simulations of chemotaxis protein "CheY" from thermophilic origin Thermotoga maritima and its mesophilic counterpart Salmonella enterica have been performed for 10 ns each at 300 and 350 K, and 20 ns each at 400 and 450 K. The trajectories were analyzed in terms of different factors like root-mean-square deviation, root-mean-square fluctuation, radius of gyration, solvent accessible surface area, H-bonds, salt bridge content, and protein-solvent interactions which indicate distinct differences between the two of them. The two proteins also follow dissimilar unfolding pathways. The overall flexibility calculated by the trace of the diagonalized covariance matrix displays similar flexibility of both the proteins near their optimum growth temperatures. However, at higher temperatures mesophilic protein shows increased overall flexibility than its thermophilic counterpart. Principal component analysis also indicates that the essential subspaces explored by the simulations of two proteins at different temperatures are nonoverlapping and they show significantly different directions of motion. However, there are significant overlaps within the trajectories and similar direction of motions are observed for both proteins at 300 K. Overall, the mesophilic protein leads to increased conformational sampling of the phase space than its thermophilic counterpart. This is the first ever study of thermostability of CheY protein homologs by using protein dynamism as a main impact. Our study might be used as a model for studying the molecular basis of thermostability of two homologous proteins from two organisms living at different temperatures with less visible differences.