Further (physical) chemical elegance

If the chemical name phosphatidyl serine (PS) draws a blank, read the verbatim copy of a previous post under the *** to find out why it is so important to our existence. It is an ‘eat me’ signal when there is lots of it around, telling professional scavenger cells to engulf the cell showing lots of PS on its surface.

Life, as usual, is more complicated. There are a variety of proteins exposed on cell surfaces which bind to phosphoserine. Not only that, but exposing just a little PS on the surface of a cell can trigger a protective immune response. Immune cells binding to just a little PS on the surface of another cell proliferate rather than eat the cell expressing the PS. This brings us to Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 111 pp 5526 – 5531 ’14 that explains how a given PS receptor (called TIM4) acts differently depending how much PS is present.

Some PS receptors such as Annexin V have essentially an all or none response to PS, if they bind at all, they trigger a response in the cell carrying them. Not so for TIM4 which only reacts if there is a lot of PS around, leaving cells which express less PS alone. This allows these cells to function in the protective immune response.

So how does TIM4 do this? See if you can think of a mechanism before reading the rest.

In addition to the PS binding pocket TIM4 has 4 peripheral basic residues in separate places. The basic residues are positively charged at physiologic pH and bind to the negatively charged phosphate group of phosphatidyl serene or to the carboxylate anion of phosphatidyl serine. The paper doesn’t explain how these basic residues don’t bind to the other phospholipids of the cell surface (such as phosphatidyl choline or sphingomyelin). It is conceivable that the basic side chains (arginine, lysine etc.) are so set up that they only bind to carboxylate anions and not phosphate anions (but this is a stretch). That would at least give them specificity for phosphatidyl serene as opposed the other phospholipids present in both leaflets of the cell membrane. In any even TIM4 will be triggered only if these groups also bind PS, leaving cells which show relatively little PS alone. Clever no?

For the cognoscenti, the Hill coefficient of TIM4 is 2 while that of Annexin V is 8 (describing more than explaining the all or none character of Annexin V binding).

****
Flippase. Eat me signals. Dragging their tails behind them. Have cellular biologists and structural biochemists gone over to the dark side? It’s all quite innocuous as the old nursery rhyme will show

Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep
and doesn’t know where to find them
Leave them alone, and they’ll come home
wagging their tails behind them.

First, some cellular biochemistry. The lipid bilayer encasing all our cells is made of two leaflets, inner and outer. The composition of the two is different (unlike the soap bubble). On the inside we find phosphatidylethanolamine (PE), phosphatidylserine (PS). The outer leaflet contains phosphatidylcholine (PC) and sphingomyelin (SM) and almost no PE or PS. This is clearly a low entropy situation compared to having all 4 randomly dispersed between the 2 leaflets.

What is the possible use of this (notice how teleology invariably creeps into cellular biology)? Chemistry is powerless to explain such things. Much as I love chemistry, such truths must be faced.

It takes energy to maintain this peculiar distribution. The enzyme moving PE and PS back inside the cell is the flippase. It requires energy in the form of ATP to operate. When a cell is dying ATP drops, and entropy takes its course moving PE and PS to the cell surface. Specialized cells (macrophages) exist to scoop up the dying or dead cells, without causing inflammation. They recognize PE and PS by a variety of receptors and munch up cells exposing them on the surface. So PE and PS are eat me signals which appear when there isn’t enough ATP around for flippase to use to haul PE and PS back inside. Clever no?

No for some juicy chemistry (assuming that you consider transport of a molecule across a lipid bilayer actual chemistry — no covalent bonds to the transferred molecule are formed or removed, although they are to the transporter). Well it certainly is physical chemistry isn’t it?

Here are the structures of PE, PS, PC, SM http://www.google.com/search?q=phosphatidylserine&client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=bDRLU5yfHOPLsQSOnoG4BA&ved=0CPABEIke&biw=1540&bih=887#facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=qrLByG2vmhWdwM%253A%3BwAtgsTPwCxeZXM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fscience.csumb.edu%252F~hkibak%252F241_web%252Fimg%252Fpng%252FCommon_Phospholipids.png%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fscience.csumb.edu%252F~hkibak%252F241_web%252Fcoursework_pages%252F2012_02_2.html%3B1297%3B934.

There are a few things to notice. Like just about every lipid found in our membranes, they are amphipathic — they have a very lipid soluble part (look at the long hydrocarbon changes hanging below them) and a very water soluble part — the head groups containing the phosphate.

This brings us to [ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 111 pp. E1334 - E1343 '14 ] Which describes ATP8A2 (aka the flippase). Interestingly, the protein, with at least 10 alpha helices spanning the membrane, and 3 cytoplasmic domains closely resembles the classic sodium pump beloved of neurophysioloogists everywhere, which pumps sodium ions out of neurons and pumps potassium ions inside, producing the equally beloved membrane potential of neurons.

Look at those structures again. While there are charges on PE, PS (on the phosphate group), these molecules are far larger than the sodium or the potassium ion (easily by a factor of 10). This has long been recognized and is called the ‘giant substrate problem’.

The paper solved the structure of ATP8A2 and used molecular dynamics stimulations to try to understand how it works. What they found is that transmembrane alpha helices 1, 2, 4 and 6 (out of 10) form a water filled cavity, which dissolves the negatively charged phosphate of the head group. What happens to those long hydrocarbon tails? The are left outside the helices in the lipid core of the membrane. It is the charged head groups that are dragged through by the flippase, with the tails wagging along behind them, just like little Bo Peep.

There’s a lot more great chemistry in the paper, particularly how Isoleucine #364 directs the sequential formation and annihilation of the water filled cavities between alpha helices 1, 2, 4 and 6, and how a particular aspartic acid is phosphorylated (by ATP, explaining why the enzyme no longer works in energetically dying cells) changing conformation of all 10 transmembrane helices, so that only one half of the channel is open at a time (either to the inside or the outside).

Go read and enjoy. It’s sad that people who don’t know organic chemistry are cut off from appreciating such elegance. There is more to esthetics than esthetics.

Just when you thought you understood neurotransmission

Back in the day, the discovery of neurotransmission allowed us to think we understood how the brain worked. I remember explaining to medical students in the early 70s, that the one way flow of information from the presynaptic neuron to the post-synaptic one was just like the flow of current in a vacuum tube — yes a vacuum tube, assuming anyone reading knows what one is. Later I changed this to transistor when integrated circuits became available.

Also the Dale hypothesis as it was taught to me, was that a given neuron released the same neurotransmitter at all its endings. As it was taught back in the 60s this meant that just one transmitter was released by a given neuron.

Retrograde transmission was just a glimmer in the mind’s eye back then. We now know that the post-synaptic neuron releases compounds which affect the presynaptic neuron, the supposed controller of the postsynaptic neuron. Among them are carbon monoxide, and the endocannabinoids (e. g. what marihuana is trying to mimic).

In addition there are neurotransmitter receptors on the presynaptic neuron, which respond to what it and other neurons are releasing to control its activity. These are outside the synapse itself. These events occur more slowly than the millisecond responses in the synapse to the main excitatory neurotransmitter of the brain (glutamic acid) and the main inhibitory neurotransmitter (gamma amino butyric acid — aka GABA). Receptors on the presynaptic neuron for the transmitter it’s releasing are called autoreceptors, but the presynaptic terminal also contains receptors for other neurotransmitters.

Well at least, neurotransmitters aren’t released by the presynaptic neuron without an action potential which depolarizes the presynaptic terminal, or so we thought until [ Neuron vol. 82 pp. 63 - 70 '14 ]. The report involves a structure near and dear to the neurologist the striatum (caudate and putamen — which is striated because the myelinated axons of the internal capsule go through its anterior end giving it a striated appearance).

It is the death of the dopamine containing neurons in the substantial nigra which cause Parkinsonism. They project some of their axons to the striatum. The striatum gets input elsewhere (from the cortex using glutamic acid) and from neurons intrinsic to itself (some of which use acetyl choline as their neurotransmitter — these are called cholinergic interneurons).

The paper makes the claim that the dopamine neurons projecting to the striatum also contain the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA.

The paper also says that the cholinergic interneurons cause release of GABA by the dopamine neurons — they bind to a type of acetyl choline receptor called nicotinic (similar but not identical to the nicotinic receptors which allow our muscles to contract) in the presynaptic terminals of the dopamine neurons of the substantial nigra residing in the striatum. Isn’t medicine and neuroanatomy a festival of terms? It’s why you need a good memory to survive medical school.

These used optogenetics (something I don’t have time to explain — but see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics ) to selectively stimulate the 1 – 2% of striatal neurons which use acetyl choline as a neurotransmitter. What they found was that only GABA (and not dopamine) was released by the dopamine neurons in response to stimulating this small subset of neurons. Even more amazing, the GABA release occurred without an action potential depolarizing the presynaptic terminal.

This literally stands everything I thought I knew about neurotransmission on its ear. How widespread this phenomenon actually is, isn’t known at this point. Clearly, the work needs to be replicated — extreme claims require extreme evidence.

Unfortunately I’ve never provided much background on neurotransmission for the hapless chemists and medicinal chemists reading this (if there are any), but medicinal chemists must at least have a smattering of knowledge about this, since neurotransmission is involved in how large classes of CNS active drugs work — antidepressants, antipsychotics, anticonvulsants, migraine therapy. There is some background on this here — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/some-basic-pharmacology-for-the-college-student/

Little Bo Peep meets cellular biology and biochemistry.

Flippase. Eat me signals. Dragging their tails behind them. Have cellular biologists and structural biochemists gone over to the dark side? It’s all quite innocuous as the old nursery rhyme will show

Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep
and doesn’t know where to find them
Leave them alone, and they’ll come home
wagging their tails behind them.

First, some cellular biochemistry. The lipid bilayer encasing all our cells is made of two leaflets, inner and outer. The composition of the two is different (unlike the soap bubble). On the inside we find phosphatidylethanolamine (PE), phosphatidylserine (PS). The outer leaflet contains phosphatidylcholine (PC) and sphingomyelin (SM) and almost no PE or PS. This is clearly a low entropy situation compared to having all 4 randomly dispersed between the 2 leaflets.

What is the possible use of this (notice how teleology invariably creeps into cellular biology)? Chemistry is powerless to explain such things. Much as I love chemistry, such truths must be faced.

It takes energy to maintain this peculiar distribution. The enzyme moving PE and PS back inside the cell is the flippase. It requires energy in the form of ATP to operate. When a cell is dying ATP drops, and entropy takes its course moving PE and PS to the cell surface. Specialized cells (macrophages) exist to scoop up the dying or dead cells, without causing inflammation. They recognize PE and PS by a variety of receptors and munch up cells exposing them on the surface. So PE and PS are eat me signals which appear when there isn’t enough ATP around for flippase to use to haul PE and PS back inside. Clever no?

No for some juicy chemistry (assuming that you consider transport of a molecule across a lipid bilayer actual chemistry — no covalent bonds to the transferred molecule are formed or removed, although they are to the transporter). Well it certainly is physical chemistry isn’t it?

Here are the structures of PE, PS, PC, SM http://www.google.com/search?q=phosphatidylserine&client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=bDRLU5yfHOPLsQSOnoG4BA&ved=0CPABEIke&biw=1540&bih=887#facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=qrLByG2vmhWdwM%253A%3BwAtgsTPwCxeZXM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fscience.csumb.edu%252F~hkibak%252F241_web%252Fimg%252Fpng%252FCommon_Phospholipids.png%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fscience.csumb.edu%252F~hkibak%252F241_web%252Fcoursework_pages%252F2012_02_2.html%3B1297%3B934.

There are a few things to notice. Like just about every lipid found in our membranes, they are amphipathic — they have a very lipid soluble part (look at the long hydrocarbon changes hanging below them) and a very water soluble part — the head groups containing the phosphate.

This brings us to [ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 111 pp. E1334 - E1343 '14 ] Which describes ATP8A2 (aka the flippase). Interestingly, the protein, with at least 10 alpha helices spanning the membrane, and 3 cytoplasmic domains closely resembles the classic sodium pump beloved of neurophysioloogists everywhere, which pumps sodium ions out of neurons and pumps potassium ions inside, producing the equally beloved membrane potential of neurons.

Look at those structures again. While there are charges on PE, PS (on the phosphate group), these molecules are far larger than the sodium or the potassium ion (easily by a factor of 10). This has long been recognized and is called the ‘giant substrate problem’.

The paper solved the structure of ATP8A2 and used molecular dynamics stimulations to try to understand how it works. What they found is that transmembrane alpha helices 1, 2, 4 and 6 (out of 10) form a water filled cavity, which dissolves the negatively charged phosphate of the head group. What happens to those long hydrocarbon tails? The are left outside the helices in the lipid core of the membrane. It is the charged head groups that are dragged through by the flippase, with the tails wagging along behind them, just like little Bo Peep.

There’s a lot more great chemistry in the paper, particularly how Isoleucine #364 directs the sequential formation and annihilation of the water filled cavities between alpha helices 1, 2, 4 and 6, and how a particular aspartic acid is phosphorylated (by ATP, explaining why the enzyme no longer works in energetically dying cells) changing conformation of all 10 transmembrane helices, so that only one half of the channel is open at a time (either to the inside or the outside).

Go read and enjoy. It’s sad that people who don’t know organic chemistry are cut off from appreciating such elegance. There is more to esthetics than esthetics.

At the Alumni Day

‘It’s Complicated’. No this isn’t about the movie where Meryl Streep made a feeble attempt to be a porn star. It’s what I heard from a bunch of Harvard PhD physicists who had listened to John Kovac talk about the BICEP2 experiment a day earlier. I had figured as a humble chemist that if anyone would understand why polarized light from the Cosmic Background Radiation would occur in pinwheels they would. But all the ones I talked to admitted that they didn’t.

The experiment is huge for physics and several articles explain why this is so [ Science vol. 343 pp. 1296 - 1297m vol. 344 pp. 19 - 20 '14, Nature vol. 507 pp. 281 - 283 '14 ]. BICEP2 provided strong evidence for gravitational waves, cosmic inflation, and the existence of a quantum theory of gravity (assuming it holds up and something called SPIDER confirms it next year). The nice thing about the experiment is that it found something predicted by theory years ago. This is the way Science is supposed to operate. Contrast this with the climate models which have been totally unable to predict the more than decade of unchanged mean global temperature that we are currently experiencing.

Well we know gravity can affect light — this was the spectacular experimental conformation of General Relativity by Eddington nearly a century ago. But how quantum fluctuations in the gravitational field lead to gravitational waves, and how these waves lead to the polarization of the background electromagnetic radiation occurring in pinwheels is a mystery to me and a bunch of physicists had more high powered than I’ll ever be. If someone can explain this, please write a comment. The articles cited above are very good to explain context and significance, but they don’t even try to explain why the data looks the way it does.

The opening talk was about terrorism, and what had been learned about it by studying worldwide governmental responses to a variety of terrorist organizations (Baader Meinhof, Shining Path, Red Brigades). The speaker thought our response to 9/11 was irrational — refusing to fly when driving is clearly more dangerous etc. etc. It was the typical arrogance of the intelligent, who cannot comprehend why everyone does not think the way they do.

I thought it was remarkable that a sociologist would essentially deprecate the way people think about risk. I’m sure that many in the room were against any form of nuclear power, despite its safety compared to everything else and absent carbon footprint.

Addendum 7 April — The comment by Handles and link he provided is quite helpful, although I still don’t understand it as well as I’d like. Here’s the link https://medium.com/p/25c5d719187b

The death of the synonymous codon – IV

The coding capacity of our genome continues to amaze. The redundancy of the genetic code has been put to yet another use. Depending on how much you know, skip the following three links and read on. Otherwise all the background to understand the following is in them.

https://luysii.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/the-death-of-the-synonymous-codon/

https://luysii.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/the-death-of-the-synonymous-codon-ii/

https://luysii.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/the-death-of-the-synonymous-codon-iii/

There really was no way around it. If you want to code for 20 different amino acids with only four choices at each position, two positions (4^2) won’t do. You need three positions, which gives you 64 possibilities (61 after the three stop codons are taken into account) and the redundancy that comes with it. The previous links show how the redundant codons for some amino acids aren’t redundant at all but used to code for the speed of translation, or for exonic splicing enhancers and inhibitors. Different codons for the same amino acid can produce wildly different effects leaving the amino acid sequence of a given protein alone.

If anything will figure out a way to use synonymous codons for its own ends, it’s cancer. [ Cell vol. 156 pp. 1129 - 1131, 1324 - 1335 '14 ] analyzed protein coding genes in cancer. Not just a few cases, but the parts of the genome coding for the exons of a mere 3,851 cases of cancer. In addition they did whole genome sequencing in 400 cases of 19 different tumor types.

There are genes which suppress cancer (which cancer often knocks out — such as the retinoblastoma or the ubiquitous p53), and genes which when mutated promote it (oncogenes like ras). They found a 1.3 fold enrichment of synonymous mutations in oncogenes (which would tend to activate them) than in the tumor suppressors. The synonymous mutations accounted for 20 – 40 % of somatic mutations found in cancer exomes.

Unfortunately, synonymous mutations have been used to estimate the background mutation frequency for evolutionary analysis, on the theory that they are neutral (e.g. because they don’t change protein structure, they are assumed not to change how the gene for the protein functions). Wrong. Wrong. They can change how much, or where, or what exons of a protein are included in the final product.

The prions within us

Head for the hills. All of us have prions within us sayeth [ Cell vol. 156 pp. 1127 - 1129, 1193 - 1206, 1206 - 1222 '14 ]. They are part of the innate immune system and help us fight infection. But aren’t all sorts of horrible disease (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy aka BSE, Jakob Creutzfeldt disease aka JC disease, Familial Fatal Insomnia etc. etc.) due to prions? Yes they are.

If you’re a bit shaky on just what a prion is see the previous post which should get you up to speed — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2014/03/30/a-primer-on-prions/.

Initially there was an enormous amount of contention when Stanley Prusiner proposed that Jakob Creutzfeldt disease was due to a protein forming an unusual conformation, which made other copies of the same protein adopt it. It was heredity without DNA or RNA (although this was hotly contended at the time), but the evidence accumulating over the years has convinced pretty much everyone except Laura Manuelidis (about whom more later). It convinced the Nobel Prize committee at any rate.

JC disease is a rapidly progressive dementia which kills people within a year. Fortunately rare (attack rate 1 per million per year) it is due to misfolded protein called PrP (unfortunately initially called ‘the’ prion protein although we now know of many more). Trust me, the few cases I saw over the years were horrible. Despite decades of study, we have no idea what PrP does, and mice totally lacking a functional Prp gene are normal. It is found on the surface of neurons. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy was a real scare for a time, because it was feared that you could get it from eating meat from a cow which had it. Fortunately there have been under 200 cases, and none recently.

If you cut your teeth on the immune system being made of antibodies and white cells and little else, you’re seriously out of date. The innate immune system is really the front line against infection by viruses and bacteria, long before antibodies against them can be made. There are all sorts of receptors inside and outside the cell for chemicals found in bacteria and viruses but not in us. Once the receptors have found something suspicious inside the cell, a large protein aggregate forms which activates an enzyme called caspase1 which cleaves the precursor of a protein called interleukin 1Beta, which is then released from some immune cells (no one ever thought the immune system would be simple given all that it has to do). Interleukin1beta acts on all sorts of cells to cause inflammation.

There are different types of inflammasomes and the nomenclature of their components is maddening. Two of the sensors for bacterial products (AIM, NLRP2) induce a polymerization of an inflammasome adaptor protein called ASC producing a platform for the rest of the inflammasome, which contains other proteins bound to it, along with caspase1 whose binding to the other proteins activates it. (Terrible sentence, but things really are that complicated).

ASC, like most platform proteins (scaffold proteins), is made of many different modules. One module in particular is called pyrin (because one of the cardinal signs of inflammation is fever). Here’s where it gets really interesting — the human pyrin domain in ASC can replace the prion domain of the first yeast prion to be discovered (Sup35 aka [ PSI+ ] — see the above link if you don’t know what these are) and still have it function as a prion in yeast. Even more amazing, is the fact that the yeast prion domain can functionally replace ASC modules in our inflammasomes and have them work (read the references above if you don’t believe this — I agree that it’s paradigm destroying). Evidence for human prions just doesn’t get any better than this. Fortunately, our inflammasome prions are totally unrelated to PrP which can cause such havoc with the nervous system.

Historical note: Stanley Prusiner was a year behind me at Penn Med graduating in ’67. Even worse, he was a member of my med school fraternity (which was more a place to get a decent meal than a social organization). Although I doubtless ate lunch and dinner with him before marrying in my Junior year, I have absolutely no recollection of him. I do remember our class’s medical Nobel — Mike Brown. Had I gone to Yale med instead of Penn, Laura Manuelidis would have been my classmate. Small world

A primer on prions

Actually Kurt Vonnegut came up with the basic idea behind prions in his 1963 Novel “Cat’s Cradle”. Instead of proteins, it involved a form of water (Ice-9) which had never been seen before, but one which was solid at room temperature. Unfortunately, it also solidified all liquid water it came in contact with effectively ending life on earth.

Now for some history.

The first Xray crystallographic structures of proteins were incredibly seductive intellectually, much as false color functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) images are today. It was hard not to think of them as the structure of the protein.

Nowaday we know that lots of proteins have at least one intrinsically disordered (trans. unstructured) segment of 30 amino acids ore more. [ Nature vol. 411 pp. 151 - 153 '11 ] says 40%, and also that 25% of all human proteins are likely to be disordered (translation; unstructured) from end to end — basic on a bioinformatics program.

I’ve always been amazed that any protein has only a few shapes, purely on the basis of the chemistry — read this if you have the time — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/why-should-a-protein-have-just-one-shape-or-any-shape-for-that-matter/. Clearly the proteins making us up do have a relatively limited number of shapes (or we’d all be dead).

The possible universe of proteins from which our proteins are selected is enormously large. In fact the whole earth doesn’t have enough mass (even if it were made entirely of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur) to make just one copy of the 20^100 possible proteins of length 100. For the calculation please see — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/how-many-proteins-can-be-made-using-the-entire-earth-mass-to-do-so/ — if you have the time.

So, even though it is meaningful question philosophically, just how common proteins with a few shapes are in this universe, we’ll never be able to carry out the experiment. Popper would say it’s a scientifically meaningless question, because it can’t be experimentally decided. Bertrand Russell would not.

Again, if you have time, take a look at https://luysii.wordpress.com/2010/08/08/a-chemical-gedanken-experiment/

Which, at long last, brings us to prions.

They were first discovered in yeast, and were extremely hard to figure out as they represented something in the cytoplasm which contained no DNA and yet which was heritable. The first prion was discovered nearly 50 years ago. It was called [PSI+] and it produced a lot of new proteins in yeast containing it (which is how its effects were measured) Mating [ PSI+ ] with [ psi-] (e.g. yeast cells without [ PSI+ ] converted the [ psi-] to [ PSI+ ]. It couldn’t be mapped to any known genetic element. Also [ PSI+ ] was lost at a higher rate than would be expected for a DNA mutation. The first clue that [ PSI+ ] was a protein was that it was lost faster when yeast were grown in the presence of protein denaturants (such as guanidine).

It turned out that [ PSI + ] was an aggregated form of the Sup35 protein, which basically functioned to suppress the ribosome from reading through the stop codon. If you need background on what was just said please see — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2010/07/07/molecular-biology-survival-guide-for-chemists-i-dna-and-protein-coding-gene-structure/ and the subsequent 4 posts. This is why [ PSI+ ] yeast produced longer proteins.Things began to get exciting when Sup35 was dissected so domains could be found which induced [ PSI+ ] formation. Amazingly these domains spontaneously formed visible fibers in vitro resembling amyloid in some respects (binding the dye Congo Red for one). Then they found that preformed fibers, greatly accelerated fiber formation by unpolymerized Sup35 — beginning to sound a bit lice Ice 9 doesn’t it. Yeasts have many other prions, but the best studied and most informative is the one formed from Sup35.

So that’s how prions were found (in yeast) and what they are — an aggregated form of a given protein in a slightly different shape, which can cause another molecule of the same protein to adopt the prion proteins new shape. Amazingly, we have prions within us. But that’s the subject of the next post.

Why drug discovery is so hard: Reason #25 — What if your drug target is really a pointer to the real target?

Any drug safely producing weight loss would be a big (or small) pharma blockbuster. Those finding it should get on the boat to Sweden. Finding a target to attack is the problem. Here’s one way to look. Take lots of fat people, lots of thin people and see what in their genomes differentiates them (assuming anything does). Actually what was done was to look at type II diabetics (non-insulin dependent) the vast majority overweight and controls. The first study involved the genomes of nearly 5,000 diabetics and controls. How did they interrogate the genomes? At the time of the work it was impossible to completely sequence this many genomes.

It’s time to speak of SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms). Our genome has 3.2 gigaBases of DNA. With sequencing being what it is, each position has a standard nucleotide at each position (one of A, T, G, or C). If 5% of the population have one of the other 3 at this position you have a SNP. Already 10 years ago, some 7 MILLION SNPs had been found and mapped to the human genome.

The first study found some SNPs associated with obesity in the diabetics. This tells where to look for the gene. A second study with nearly 9,000 diabetics and controls, replicated the first.

Then the monster study, with 39,000 people [ Science vol. 316 pp. 889 - 894 '07 ] found FTO (FaT mass and Obesity associated gene) on chromosome #16. The 16% of Caucasian adults with two copies of the variant SNP in FTO were 1.67 times more likely to be obese. An intense flurry of work showed that the gene coded for an oxidase, using iron and 2 oxo-glutaric acid (alphaKG for you old timers). The enzyme removes methyl groups from the amino group at position #6 of adenine and the 3 position of thymine. Before this time, no one really paid much attention to them. Subsequently we’ve found 6 methyl adenine in a mere 7,676 mRNAs. Just what it does when it’s there, and why the cell wants to remove it is currently being worked out.

Clearly FTO is a great target for an obesity drug. Of course they knocked the gene out in the mouse. The animals were normal at birth, but at 6 weeks weighed 30 – 40% less than normal mice. FTO as a drug target looked even better after this.

It was somewhat surprising that the SNP was in an intron in the gene. This meant that even in the obese the protein product of the FTO gene was the same as in the skinny. Presumably this could mean more FTO, less FTO or a different splice variant. If some of this molecular biology is above your pay grade, the background you need is in 5 posts starting with https://luysii.wordpress.com/2010/07/07/molecular-biology-survival-guide-for-chemists-i-dna-and-protein-coding-gene-structure/.

It was somewhat surprising that FTO levels were the same in people with and without the fat SNP. That left splice variants as a possibility.

The denouement came this week [ Nature vol. 507 pp. 309 - 310, 371 - 375 '14 ]. The intron containing the SNP in FTO produces obesity by controlling another gene called IRX3 which is a mere 500,000 nucleotides away. The intron of FTO binds to the promoter of IRX3 turning the gene on resulting in more IRX3. Mice lacking a functional copy of IRX3 have a 25 – 30% lower body mass. As any C programmer would say, FTO is the pointer not the data.

I don’t know if big or small pharma was at work finding inhibitors or enhancers of FTO function, but this paper should have brought them to a screeching halt. The FTO/IRX3 story just shows how many pitfalls there are to finding new drugs, and why the search has shown relatively little success recently. We are trying to alter the function of an incredibly complex system, whose workings we only dimly understand.

Was I the last to find out?

Quick ! Can you form a hydrogen bond from a carbon hybridized sp3 to an oxygen atom?

I didn’t think so, but you can. This, in spite of reading about proteins for over half a century. [ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 111 pp. E888 - E895 '14 ] describes this (along with lots of references backing up the statements which follow) to such bonds forming between the transmembrane segments of membrane proteins (estimated to be 30% of all our proteins).

Whether or not they contribute to membrane stability isn’t known. Consider the alpha carbon of an amino acid. It is adjacent to a carbonyl group of an amide (electron hungry, but less so than a pure carbonyl because of resonance) and the nitrogen atom of an amide (slightly more electronegative than carbon, and probably more electron hungry because it loses part of its lone pair to resonance).

They are usually found from the alpha carbon of glycine on one helix to the carbonyl of an adjacent transmembrane helix. Glycine zippers (e.g. the G X X X G motif) have long been known in transmembrane helices. Since glycine is the smallest amino acid, having them on the same side of the helix was thought to be a way to pack adjacent helices together.

What would you consider good evidence for such a bond? Spectroscopy of model compounds with deuterium for the alpha hydrogen would be one way (it’s been done). The best evidence would be a shortened distance between the hydrogen and the carbonyl and this has been found as well.

Humbling ! !

What junk DNA is doing

I’ve never bought the idea that the 98% of our 3.2 gigaBase genome not coding for protein is junk. Consider the humble leprosy organism.It’s a mycobacterium (like the organism causing TB), but because it essentially is confined to man, and lives inside humans for most of its existence, it has jettisoned large parts of its genome, first by throwing about 1/3 of it out (the genome is 1/3 smaller than TB from which it is thought to have diverged 66 million years ago), and second by mutation of many of its genes so protein can no longer be made from them. Why throw out all that DNA? The short answer is that it is metabolically expensive to produce and maintain DNA that you’re not using.

Which brings us to Cell vol. 156 pp. 907 – 919 ’14. At least half of our genome is made of repetitive elements. We have some 520,000 (imperfect) copies of LINE1 elements — each up to 6,000 nucleotides long. There are 1,400,000 (imperfect) copies of Alu each around 300 nucleotides long. This stuff has been called junk for decades. However it has become apparent that over 50% of our entire genome is transcribed into RNA. This is also expensive metabolically.

Addendum 17 Mar: Just the cost of making a single nucleotide from scratch to hook into mRNA is 50 ATP molecules (according to an estimate I read). It also takes energy for the polymerase to hook two nucleotides together — but I can’t find out what it is (anyone know?). It’s hard to avoid teleology when thinking about biology — but why should a cell expend all this metabolic energy to copy half or more of its genome into RNA, if it weren’t getting something useful back?

Why hasn’t evolution got rid of this stuff, like the leprosy organism? Probably because it’s doing several important things we don’t understand. Here’s one of them. The cell paper did something clever and obvious (now that someone else though of it). C0T-1 DNA is placental DNA predominantly 50 – 300 nucleotides in size, very enriched in repetitive DNA sequences. It is used to block nonspecific hybridization in microarray screening for mRNA coding for protein. The authors used C0T-1 DNA to look at whole cells to find RNA transcribed from these repetitive elements, and more importantly, to find where in the cell it was located.

Guess what they found? Repetitive DNA is associated big time with interphase (e.g. not undergoing mitosis) active chromatin (aka euchromatin). So RNA transcribed from Alu and LINE1 is a structural component of our chromosomes. Since the length of the 3.2 gigaBases of our genome, if stretched out, is 1 METER, a lot of our DNA occurs in very compact structures (heterochromatin) which is thought to be transcriptionally inactive. What happens when you use RNAase (an enzyme breaking down RNA) to remove it? The chromosomes condense to heterochromatin. So the junk may be keeping our chromosomes in an ‘open’ state, a fairly significant function.

This is the exact opposite of XIST, a 17,000 nucleotide RNA transcribed from the X chromosome, which keeps one of the two X’s each female possesses inactive by coating it like the ecRNAs

The authors conclude with “we are far from understanding genome expression and regulation.” Amen.

If some of this is a bit above your molecular biological pay grade — please see a series of articles “Molecular Biology Survival Guide for Chemists” — here’s a link to the first one — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2010/07/07/molecular-biology-survival-guide-for-chemists-i-dna-and-protein-coding-gene-structure/. There are 4 more.