Comparison of Replica Exchange Simulations of a Kinetically Trapped Protein Conformational State and its Native Form

Recently an X-ray crystallographic structure of a single-domain antibody was reported with the protein chain trapped in a rare homodimeric form. One of the conformers appears to exhibit a misfolded region, and thus presumably the configurational stability is less favorable. To investigate whether simulation methods can detect any difference between the conformers and buttress the notion that one conformation is trapped on a pathway that incurs lower activation energy to unfold, adaptive temperature-based replica exchange simulations were applied to each chain to model conformational transitions. Simulation results found that the observed crystallographic difference between the two chains in the complementarity determining region CDR2 induces a stark distinction in conformational populations on the energy landscape. An appraisal of the energetic difference between the CDR2 conformations at 300 K revealed a localized order-disorder free-energy transition of roughly equivalent to two peptide hydrogen bonds in solution. It was also found that interconversion between the conformers is slower than the rate to unfold and that near an unfolding transition temperature one conformer retained a greater fraction of native-like contacts and energy over a longer time span before fully populating the denatured state, thus verifying the coexistence of a metastable conformation in the crystallographic assembly.