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General Counteraction Exerted by Sugars against Denaturants

The conformational stability of globular proteins is strongly influenced by the addition to water of different co-solutes. Some of the latter destabilize the native state, while others stabilize it. It is emerging that stabilizing agents are able to counteract the action of destabilizing agents. We...

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Autores principales: Cozzolino, Serena, Tortorella, Attila, Del Vecchio, Pompea, Graziano, Giuseppe
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8303697/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34357025
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/life11070652
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author Cozzolino, Serena
Tortorella, Attila
Del Vecchio, Pompea
Graziano, Giuseppe
author_facet Cozzolino, Serena
Tortorella, Attila
Del Vecchio, Pompea
Graziano, Giuseppe
author_sort Cozzolino, Serena
collection PubMed
description The conformational stability of globular proteins is strongly influenced by the addition to water of different co-solutes. Some of the latter destabilize the native state, while others stabilize it. It is emerging that stabilizing agents are able to counteract the action of destabilizing agents. We have already provided experimental evidence that this counteraction is a general phenomenon and offered a rationalization. In the present work, we show that four different sugars, namely fructose, glucose, sucrose, and trehalose, counteract the effect of urea, tetramethylurea, sodium perchlorate, guanidinium chloride, and guanidinium thiocyanate despite the chemical and structural differences of those destabilizing agents. The rationalization we provide is as follows: (a) the solvent-excluded volume effect, a purely entropic effect, stabilizes the native state, whose solvent-accessible surface area is smaller than the one of denatured conformations; (b) the magnitude of the solvent-excluded volume effect increases markedly in ternary solutions because the experimental density of such solutions is larger than that of pure water.
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spelling pubmed-83036972021-07-25 General Counteraction Exerted by Sugars against Denaturants Cozzolino, Serena Tortorella, Attila Del Vecchio, Pompea Graziano, Giuseppe Life (Basel) Article The conformational stability of globular proteins is strongly influenced by the addition to water of different co-solutes. Some of the latter destabilize the native state, while others stabilize it. It is emerging that stabilizing agents are able to counteract the action of destabilizing agents. We have already provided experimental evidence that this counteraction is a general phenomenon and offered a rationalization. In the present work, we show that four different sugars, namely fructose, glucose, sucrose, and trehalose, counteract the effect of urea, tetramethylurea, sodium perchlorate, guanidinium chloride, and guanidinium thiocyanate despite the chemical and structural differences of those destabilizing agents. The rationalization we provide is as follows: (a) the solvent-excluded volume effect, a purely entropic effect, stabilizes the native state, whose solvent-accessible surface area is smaller than the one of denatured conformations; (b) the magnitude of the solvent-excluded volume effect increases markedly in ternary solutions because the experimental density of such solutions is larger than that of pure water. MDPI 2021-07-04 /pmc/articles/PMC8303697/ /pubmed/34357025 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/life11070652 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Cozzolino, Serena
Tortorella, Attila
Del Vecchio, Pompea
Graziano, Giuseppe
General Counteraction Exerted by Sugars against Denaturants
title General Counteraction Exerted by Sugars against Denaturants
title_full General Counteraction Exerted by Sugars against Denaturants
title_fullStr General Counteraction Exerted by Sugars against Denaturants
title_full_unstemmed General Counteraction Exerted by Sugars against Denaturants
title_short General Counteraction Exerted by Sugars against Denaturants
title_sort general counteraction exerted by sugars against denaturants
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8303697/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34357025
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/life11070652
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