The uses and abuses of molarity — III

2 dimensional gases were made years and years ago but no one talks about them any more. I found them fascinating as a neophyte chemistry student. Just take a typical fatty acid with a long hydrophobic tail (say stearic acid with 18 carbons) and place a small amount on water. The COOH groups hydrogen bond with the water, while the hydrocarbon tails lie on the surface of the water. Confine them to a small area, and the hydrophobic tails stick straight up away from the air water interface. Now constrict the area they are found in. The force on the wall forming the constriction is proportional to the number of molecules in the area and the area and the temperature — e.g. PA = nRT — the ideal gas law in two dimensions. So confined stearic acid on the surface of water is a two dimensional gas.

It would be nice if we could get a similar 2 dimensional arrangement of G Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) — see the previous post — but we can’t (so far). 

Of course there is a darker side. The films are known as Langmuir Blodgett films.

Irving Langmuir won the Nobel prize in Chemistry for this (and other work). Blodgett who was instrumental in figuring out how to make the films got nothing. 

Why?  Probably because she was a woman — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_Burr_Blodgett..  She was a Bryn Mawr graduate and the first woman to receive a PhD in physics from Cambridge. 

Moving along to another Bryn Mawr graduate; Candace Pert really discovered the opiate receptor at Johns Hopkins. She was screwed out of proper recognition by her PhD advisor, Solomon Snyder.  While he now has a department named after him at  Hopkins,  he will never receive the Nobel prize. 

The story of Rosalind Franklin and DNA is too well known to repeat.  So I’ll close with Lise Meitner who discovered nuclear fission and got nothing except a book from an old girl friend — https://www.amazon.com/Lise-Meitner-Ruth-Lewin-Sime/dp/0520208609.  The authoress notes in the preference that she was the female chemist that the department didn’t want.  Definitely a woman with an edge, which is why I was attracted to her. 

Now, as promised, here is the Nobelist who clearly doesn’t understand Molarity.

The chemist can be excused for not knowing what a nanodomain is. They are beloved by neuroscientists, and defined as the part of the neuron directly under an ion channel in the neuronal membrane. Ion flows in and out of ion channels are crucial to the workings of the nervous system. Tetrodotoxin, which blocks one of them, is 100 times more poisonous than cyanide. 25 milliGrams (roughly 1/3 of a baby aspirin) will kill you.

Nanodomains are quite small, and Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 110 pp. 15794 – 15799 ’13 defines them as hemispheres having a radius of 10 nanoMeters from channel (a nanoMeter is 10^-9 meter — I want to get everyone on board for what follows, I’m not trying to insult your intelligence). The paper talks about measuring concentrations of calcium ions in such a nanodomain. Previous work by a Nobelist (Neher) came up with 100 microMolar elevations of calcium in nanodomains when one of the channels was opened. Yes, evolution has produced ion channels permeable to calcium and not much else, sodium and not much else, potassium and not much else. For details read the papers of Roderick MacKinnon (another Nobelist). The mechanisms behind this selectivity are incredibly elegant — and I can tell you that no one figured out just what they were until we had the actual structures of channels in hand. As chemists you’re sure to get a kick out of them.

The neuroscientist (including Neher the Nobelist) cannot be excused for not understanding the concept of concentration and its limits.

How many ions are in a cc. of a 1 molar solution of calcium — 6 * 10^20 (Avogadro’s #/1000).A cc. (cubic centimeter) is 1/1000th of a liter) How many ions  in a 10^-4 molar solution (100 microMolar) — 6 * 10^16. How many calcium ions in a nanoDomain at this concentration? Just (6 * 10^16)/(5 * 10^17) e.g. just over .1 ion/nanodomain. As Bishop Berkeley would say this is the ghost a departed ion.

Does any chemist out there think that speaking of a 100 microMolar concentration in a volume this small is meaningful? I’d love to be shown how my calculation is wrong, if anyone would care to post a comment.

 

Not physical organic chemistry but organic physical chemistry

This post is about physical chemistry with organic characteristics in the sense that capitalism in China is called socialism with Chinese characteristics. A lot of cell biology is also involved.

I remember the first time I heard about Irving Langmuir and the two dimensional gas he created. It even followed a modified perfect gas law (PA = nRT where A is area). He did this by making a monolayer of long chain fatty acids on water, with the carboxyl groups binding to the water, and the hydrocarbon side chain sticking up into the air. I thought this was incredibly neat. It was the first example of organic physical chemistry. He published his work in 1917 and won the Nobel in Chemistry for it in 1932.

Fast forward to our understanding of the membrane encasing our cells (the technical term is plasma membrane to distinguish from the myriad other membranes inside our cells. To a first approximation it’s just two Langmuir films back to back with the hydrocarbon chains of the lipids dissolving in each other, and the hydrophilic parts of the membrane lipids binding to the water on either side. This is why it’s called a lipid bilayer.

Most of the signals going into our cells must pass through the plasma membrane, using proteins spanning it. As a neurologist I spent a lot of time throwing drugs at them — examples include every known receptor for neurotransmitters, reuptake proteins for them (think the dopamine transporter), ion channels. The list goes on and on and includes the over 800 G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) with their 7 transmembrane segments we have in our genome [ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 111 pp. 1825 – 1830 ’14 ].

Glypiated proteins (you heard right) also known as PIGtailed proteins (you heard that right too) don’t follow this pattern. They are proteins anchored in the outer leaflet of the plasma membrane lipid bilayer by covalently linked phosphatidyl inositol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphatidylinositol — the picture shows you why — inositol is a sugar, hence crawling with hydroxyl groups, while the phosphatidic acid part has two long hydrocarbon chains which can embed in the outer leaflet. We have 150 of them as of 2009 (probably more now). Examples of PIGtailed proteins include alkaline phosphatase, Thy-1 antigen, acetyl cholinesterase, lipoprotein lipase, and decay accelerating factor. So most of them are enzymes working on stuff outside the cell, so they don’t need to signal.

Enter the lipid raft. [ Cell vol. 161 pp. 433 – 434, 581 – 594 ’15 ] It’s been 18 years since rafts were first proposed, and their existence is still controversial (with zillions of papers saying they exist and more zillions saying they don’t). What are they — definitions vary (particularly about how large they are). Here’s what Molecular Biology of the Cell 4th edition p. 589 had to say about them — Rafts are small (700 Angstroms in diameter). Rafts are rich in sphingolipids, glycolipids and cholesterol. The hydrocarbon chains are longer and straighter than those of most membrane lipids, rafts are thicker than other parts of bilayer. This allows them to better accomodate ‘certain’ membrane proteins, which accumulate there. [ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 100 p. 8055 – 7’03 ] These include glycosylphosphatidylinositol anchored proteins (glypiated proteins), cholesterol linked and palmitoylated proteins such as Hedgehog, Src family kinases and the alpha subunits of G proteins, cytokine receptors and integrins.

Biochemical analysis shows that rafts consist of cholesterol and sphingolipids in the exoplasmic leaflet (outer layer of the plasma membrane) of the lipid bilayer and cholesterol and phospholipids with saturated fatty acids in the endoplasmic leaflet (layer facing the cytoplasm). The raft is less fluid than surrounding areas of the membrane. So if they in fact exist, rafts contain a lot of important cellular players.

The Cell paper introduced synthetic fluorescent glypiated proteins into the outer plasma membrane leaflet of Chinese hamster ovary cells and was able to demonstrate nanoClustering on scales under 1,000 Angstroms (way too small to see with visible light, accounting for a lot of the controversy concerning their existence).

How can the authors make such a statement? The evidence was a decrease in fluorescence anisotropy due to Forster resonance energy transfer effects. Forster energy transfer is interesting in that it doesn’t involve molecule #1 losing energy by emitting a photon which is absorbed by molecule #2 increasing its energy. It works by molecule #1 inducing a dipole in molecule #2 (by a Van der Waals effect). Obviously, to do this, the molecules must be fairly close, and transfer efficiency falls off as the inverse 6th power of the distance between the two molecules.

In Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET), one fluorophore (the donor) transfers its excited state energy to a different fluorophore (the acceptor) which emits fluorescence of a different color. For more details see — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Förster_resonance_energy_transfer — its interesting stuff. Again an example of physical chemistry with organic characteristics (and pretty good evidence for the existence of lipid rafts to boot).

Now it gets even more interesting. Nanoclustering is dependent on the length of the acyl chain forming the GPI anchor (at least 18 carbons must be present). NanoClustering diminishes on cholesterol depletion in actin depleted cell blebs and mutant cell lines deficient in the inner leaflet lipid — phosphatidylserine (PS) — which has two long chain fatty acids hanging off the glycerol. So it looks as if the saturated acyl chains of the glypiated proteins of the outer leaflet interdigitate with those of PS in inner leaflet. The effect is also enhanced on expression of proteins specifically linking PS to the actin cytoskeleton of the cortex. Binding of PS to the cortical actin cytoskeleton determines where and when the clusters will be stabilized. The coupling can work both ways — if something immobilizes and stabilizes the glypiated proteins extracellularly, than PS lipids can form correlated patches.

This might be a mechanism for information transfer across the plasma membrane (and acrossother membranes to boot). This could also serve as a way to couple many outer leaflet membrane lipids such as gangliosides and other sphingolipids with events internal to the cell. Cholesterol can stabilize the local liquid ordered domain over a length scale that is large than the size of the immobilized cluster. A variety of membrane associated proteins inside the cell (spectrin, talin, caldesmon) are able to bind actin. “The formation of the contractile actin clusters then determine when and where the domains may be stabilized, bringing the generation of membrane domains in live cells under control of the actomyosin signaling network.’

So just like the integrins which can signal from outside the cell to inside and from inside the cell to outside, glypiated proteins and the actin cytoskeleton may form a two way network for signaling. No one should have to tell you how important the actomyosin cytoskeleton is in just about everything the cell does. Truly fascinating stuff. Stay tuned.

How one membrane protein senses mechanical stress

Chemists (particularly organic chemists) think they’re pretty smart. So see if you can figure out how a membrane embedded ion channel opens due to mechanical stress. The answer is to be found in last week’s Nature (vol. 516 pp. 126 – 130 4 Dec ’14).

As you probably know, membrane embedded proteins get stuck there because they contain multiple alpha helices with mostly hydrophobic amino acids allowing them to snuggle up to the hydrocarbon tails of the lipids making up the lipid bilayer of the biological membrane.

The channel in question is called TRAAK, known to open in response to membrane tension. It conducts potassium ions. The voltage sensitive potassium channels have 24 transmembrane alpha helices, 6 in each of the tetramer proteins comprising it. TRAAK has only 8. As is typical of all ion channels, the helices act like staves on a barrel, shifting slightly to open the pore.

In this case, with little membrane tension, the helices separate slightly permitting a a 10 carbon tail ( CH3 – [ CH2 – CH2 – CH2 ]3 – ) to enter the barrel occluding the pore. Tension on the membrane tends decrease the packing of hydrocarbon tails of the membrane, pulling the plug out of the pore. Neat !! ! ! This is a completely different mechanism than the voltage sensing helix in the 24 transmembrane voltage sensitive potassium channels, and one that no one has predicted despite all their intelligence.

Trigger warning. This paper is by MacKinnon who won the Nobel for his work on potassium channels. He used antibodies to stabilize ion channels so they could be studied by crystallography. Take them out of the membrane and they denature. Why the warning? In his Nobel work he postulated an alpha helical hairpin paddle extending outward from the channel core into the membrane’s lipid interior. It was both hydrophobic and charged, and could move in response to transmembrane voltage changes.

This received vigorous criticism from others, who felt it was an artifact produced by the use of the antibody to stabilize the protein for crystallography.

Why the warning? Because MacKinnnon also used an antibody to stabilize TRAAK.

The whole idea of membrane tension brings up the question of just how strong van der Waals forces really are. Biochemists and molecular biologists tend to think of hydrophobic forces as primarily entropic, pushing hydrophobic parts of a protein together so water would have to exquisitely structure itself to solvate them (e.g. lowering the entropy greatly). Here however, the ‘pull’ if you wish, is due to the mutual attraction of the hydrophobic lipid side chains to each other, which I would imagine is pretty week.

I’m sure that these forces have been measured, and years ago I enjoyed reading about Langmuir’s work putting what was basically soap on a substrate, and forming a two dimensional gas which actually followed something resembling P * Area = n * R * T. So the van der Waals forces have been measured, I just don’t know what they are. Does anyone out there?

Nonetheless, some very slick (physical and organic) chemistry.