Using hydroxyl radical footprinting to explore the free energy landscape of protein folding

Characterisation of the conformational states adopted during protein folding, including globally unfolded/disordered structures and partially folded intermediate species, is vital to gain fundamental insights into how a protein folds. In this work we employ fast photochemical oxidation of proteins (FPOP) to map the structural changes that occur in the folding of the four-helical bacterial immunity protein, Im7. Oxidative footprinting coupled with mass spectrometry (MS) is used to probe changes in the solvent accessibility of amino acid side-chains concurrent with the folding process, by quantifying the degree of oxidation experienced by the wild-type protein relative to a kinetically trapped, three-helical folding intermediate and an unfolded variant that lacks secondary structure. Analysis of the unfolded variant by FPOP–MS shows oxidative modifications consistent with the species adopting a solution conformation with a high degree of solvent accessibility. The folding intermediate, by contrast, experiences increased levels of oxidation relative to the wild-type, native protein only in regions destabilised by the amino acid substitutions introduced. The results demonstrate the utility of FPOP–MS to characterise protein variants in different conformational states and to provide insights into protein folding mechanisms that are complementary to measurements such as hydrogen/deuterium exchange labelling and Φ-value analysis.