The Effects of p-Azidophenylalanine Incorporation on Protein Structure and Stability

Functionalization is often needed to harness the power of proteins for beneficial use but can cause losses to stability and/or activity. State of the art methods to limit these deleterious effects accomplish this by substituting an amino acid in the wild-type molecule into an unnatural amino acid, such as p-azidophenylalanine (pAz), but selecting the residue for substitution a priori remains an elusive goal of protein engineering. The results of this work indicate that all-atom molecular dynamics simulation can be used to determine whether substituting pAz for a natural amino acid will be detrimental to experimentally determined protein stability. These results offer significant hope that local deviations from wild-type structure caused by pAz incorporation observed in simulations can be a predictive metric used to reduce the number of costly experiments that must be done to find active proteins upon substitution with pAz and subsequent functionalization.