Non-additive stabilization by halogenated amino acids reveals protein plasticity on a sub-angstrom scale

It has been a long-standing goal to understand the structure-stability relationship of proteins, as optimal stability is essential for protein function and highly desirable for protein therapeutics. Halogenation has emerged as a minimally invasive strategy to probe the physical characteristics of proteins in solution, as well as enhance the structural stabilities of proteins for therapeutic applications. Although advances in synthetic chemistry and genetic code expansion have allowed for the rapid synthesis of proteins with diverse chemical sequences, much remains to be learned regarding the impact of these mutations on their structural integrity. In this contribution, we present a systematic study of three well-folded model protein systems, in which their structural stabilities are assessed in response to various hydrogen-to-halogen atom mutations. Halogenation allows for the perturbation of proteins on a sub-angstrom scale, offering unprecedented precision of protein engineering. The thermodynamic results from these model systems reveal that in certain cases, proteins can display modest steric tolerance to halogenation, yielding non-additive consequences to protein stability. The observed sub-angstrom sensitivity of protein stability highlights the delicate arrangement of a folded protein core structure. The stability data of various halogenated proteins presented herein should also provide guidelines for using halogenation as a strategy to improve the stability of protein therapeutics.