Investigating the Activation Mechanism Differences between Human and Mouse cGAS by Molecular Dynamics Simulations

Cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS) has been widely investigated as a drug target for its crucial role in innate immunity. However, the inhibitors designed using mouse model were often shown to be ineffective for humans. This outcome indicates that the activation mechanisms of human and mouse cGAS (mcGAS) are different. The cGAS activation is achieved by dimerization via binding to DNA, the detailed mechanism of which, however, is not entirely clear. To investigate these mechanisms, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were performed on several states of four types of cGAS, namely, the mcGAS, the wild-type and A- and C-type mutations of human cGAS (hcGAS). We find that sequence differences between hcGAS and mcGAS can directly affect the protein structure stability, especially that of the siteB domain. The sequence and structural differences also contribute to DNA-binding differences. In addition, the conformational fluctuations of cGAS are found to correlate with the regulation of catalytic capacity. More importantly, we illustrate that dimerization enhances the correlation among distant residues and significantly reinforces the allosteric signal transmission among the DNA-binding interfaces and the catalytic pocket, which facilitates rapid immune response to cytosolic DNA. We conclude that siteB domain plays a prominent role in mcGAS activation, while siteA domain is key to hcGAS activation.