When the dissociation constant doesn’t tell you what you want to know

Drug chemists spend a lot of time getting their drugs to bind tightly to their chosen target.  Kd’s (dissociation constants) are measured with care –https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_constant.  But Kd’s are only  a marker for the biologic effects that are the real reason for the drug.  That’s why it was shocking to find that Kd’s don’t seem to matter in a very important and very well studied system.

It’s not the small molecule ligand protein receptor most drug chemists deal with, it’s the goings on at the immunologic synapse between antigen presenting cell and T lymphocyte (a much larger ligand target interface — 1,000 – 2,000 Angstroms^2 — than the usual site of drug/protein binding).   A peptide fragment lies down in a groove on the Major Histocompatibility Complex (pMHC) where it is presented to the T lymphoCyte Receptor (TCR) — another protein complex.  The hope is that an immune response to the parent protein of the peptide fragment will occur.

 

However, the Kd’s (affinities)of strong (e.g. producing an immune response) peptide agonist ligands and those producing not much (e.g. weak) are similar and at times overlapping.  High affinity yet nonStimulatory interactions occur with high frequency in the human T cell repertoire [ Cell vol. 174 pp. 672 – 687 ’18 ].  The authors  determined the structure of both weak and strong ligands bound to the TCR.  One particular TCR had virtually the same structure when bound to strong and weak agonist ligands. When studied in two dimensional membranes, the dwell time of ligand with receptor didn’t distinguish strong from weak antigens (surprising).

In general the Kds  pMHC/TCR  are quite low — not in the nanoMolar range beloved by drug chemists (and found in antigen/antibody binding), but 1000 times weaker in the micromolar range.  So [ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 115 pp. E7369 – E7378 ’18 ] cleverly added an extra few amino acids which they call molecular velcro, to boost the affinity x 10 (actually this decreases Kd tenfold).

One rationale for the weak binding is that it facilitates scanning by the TCR of  the pMHC  repertoire allowing the TCR to choose the best.  So they added the velcro, expecting the repertoire to be less diverse (since the binding was tighter).  It was just the same. Again the Kd didn’t seem to matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_bond

Even more interesting, the first paper noted that productive TCR/pMHC bonds had catch bonds — e.g. bonds which get stronger the more you pull on them. The authors were actually able to measure the phenomenon. Catch bonds been shown to exist in a variety of systems (white cells sticking to blood vessel lining, bacterial adhesion), but their actual mechanism is still under debate.  The great thing about this paper (p. 682) is molecular dynamics simulation showed the conformational changes which occurred during catch bond formation in one case..   They even have videos.  Impressive.

This sort of thing is totally foreign to all solution chemistry, as there is no way to pull on a bond in solution.  Optical tweezers allow you to pull and stretch molecules (if you can attach them to large styrofoam balls).