Intrinsic Dynamics of Protein-Peptide Unbinding

The dynamics of peptide-protein binding and unbinding of a variant of the RNase S system has been investigated. To initiate the process, a photoswitchable azobenzene moiety has been covalently linked to the S-peptide, thereby switching its binding affinity to the S-protein. Transient fluorescence quenching was measured with the help of a time-resolved fluorometer, which has been specifically designed for these experiments and is based on inexpensive light-emitting diodes and laser diodes only. One mutant shows on-off behavior with no specific binding detectable in one of the states of the photoswitch. Unbinding is faster by at least 2 orders of magnitude, compared to that of other variants of the RNase S system. We conclude that unbinding is essentially barrier-less in that case, revealing the intrinsic dynamics of the unbinding event, which occurs on a time scale of a few hundred microseconds in a strongly stretched-exponential manner.