New method of detecting hydrophobic interaction between C-terminal binding domain and biomacromolecules

The C-terminal domains of proteases play crucial roles in hydrolysis, substrate adsorption and targeted binding. Identifying and characterizing interactions between C-terminal domains and biomacromolecules can help to examine the diversity as well as the substrate-binding ability of C-terminal domains and to explore novel functions. The bacterial pre-peptidase C-terminal (PPC) domain is a typical C-terminal domain normally found at the C-terminus of bacterial secreted proteases. In this work, we successfully demonstrated that 8-anilinonaphthalene-1-sulfonic acid (ANS) could be used to rapidly determine the interactions between this C-terminal domain and biomacromolecules. The time-resolved ANS fluorescence of PPC and collagen interaction could be used for quantitative analysis of the collagen-binding capability based on the slope of the time-scanning curve. Using this method, we found that PPC domains had an obvious affinity to fibrillar proteins but had little or no capacity to bind polysaccharides or linear DNAs. Docking studies proved that collagen bound to the same hydrophobic site of PPC as the ANS probe, causing a decrease in the emission intensity. This method is simple and cost effective and provides an effective detection technique to analyze the interaction between this C-terminal domain and biomolecules.