Protein stability governed by its structural plasticity is inferred by physicochemical factors and salt bridges

Several organisms, specifically microorganisms survive in a wide range of harsh environments including extreme temperature, pH, and salt concentration. We analyzed systematically a large number of protein sequences with their structures to understand their stability and to discriminate extremophilic proteins from their non-extremophilic orthologs. Our results highlighted that the strategy for the packing of the protein core was influenced by the environmental stresses through substitutive structural events through better ionic interaction. Statistical analysis showed that a significant difference in number and composition of amino acid exist among them. The negative correlation of pairwise sequence alignments and structural alignments indicated that most of the extremophile and non-extremophile proteins didn’t contain any association for maintaining their functional stability. A significant numbers of salt bridges were noticed on the surface of the extremostable proteins. The Ramachandran plot data represented more occurrences of amino acids being present in helix and sheet regions of extremostable proteins. We also found that a significant number of small nonpolar amino acids and moderate number of charged amino acids like Arginine and Aspartic acid represented more nonplanar Omega angles in their peptide bond. Thus, extreme conditions may predispose amino acid composition including geometric variability for molecular adaptation of extremostable proteins against atmospheric variations and associated changes under natural selection pressure. The variation of amino acid composition and structural diversifications in proteins play a major role in evolutionary adaptation to mitigate climate change.