Correlation between chemical denaturation and the unfolding energetics of Acanthamoeba actophorin

The actin filament network is in part remodeled by the action of a family of filament severing proteins that are responsible for modulating the ratio between monomeric and filamentous actin. Recent work on the protein actophorin from the amoeba Acanthamoeba castellani identified a series of site-directed mutations that increase the thermal stability of the protein by 22°C. Here, we expand this observation by showing that the mutant protein is also significantly stable to both equilibrium and kinetic chemical denaturation, and employ computer simulations to account for the increase in thermal or chemical stability through an accounting of atomic-level interactions. Specifically, the potential of mean force (PMF) can be obtained from steered molecular dynamics (SMD) simulations in which a protein is unfolded. However, SMD can be inefficient for large proteins as they require large solvent boxes, and computationally expensive as they require increasingly many SMD trajectories to converge the PMF. Adaptive steered molecular dynamics (ASMD) overcomes the second of these limitations by steering the particle in stages, which allows for convergence of the PMF using fewer trajectories compared with SMD. Use of the telescoping water scheme within ASMD partially overcomes the first of these limitations by reducing the number of waters at each stage to only those needed to solvate the structure within a given stage. In the PMFs obtained from ASMD, the work of unfolding Acto-2 was found to be higher than the Acto-WT by approximately 120 kCal/mol and reflects the increased stability seen in the chemical denaturation experiments. The evolution of the average number of hydrogen bonds and number of salt bridges during the pulling process provides a mechanistic view of the structural changes of the actophorin protein as it is unfolded, and how it is affected by the mutation in concert with the energetics reported through the PMF.