Importance of environment in determining secondary structure in proteins

We report here the effect of bulk solvent environment on the secondary structure of several peptides. In previous work, equivocal peptide sequences that are predicted to be alpha-helical from amino acid preference but are found to be beta-strand in their proteins were shown to be alpha-helical in alcohol solvents and beta-strand in nonmicellar sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) by circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy [Zhong, L., & Johnson, W. C., Jr. (1992) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 89, 4462-4465]. Here we show that equivocal sequences that are predicted to be beta-strand but are found to be alpha-helical follow the same pattern; they are alpha-helical in alcohol solvents and beta-strand in nonmicellar SDS. Furthermore, we investigated a control sequence with only a strong alpha-helical propensity and a control sequence with only a strong beta-strand propensity. Both of these well-behaved sequences followed the same pattern as the equivocal sequences. The exceptionally stable Y(EAAAK)3A is an alpha-helix in all solvents, but analyses of the CD spectra indicate the loss of helix with an increase in beta-strand and other structures on changing solvent from trifluoroethanol (TFE) to SDS, similar to the other peptides. We find that solvent is a very important factor in determining the secondary structure of an amino acid sequence in vitro and can override the propensity for a secondary structure due to sequence.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)