Now is the winter of our discontent

One of the problems with being over 80 is that you watch your friends get sick.  In the past month, one classmate developed ALS and another has cardiac amyloidosis complete with implantable defibrillator.  The 40 year old daughter of a friend who we watched since infancy has serious breast cancer and is undergoing surgery radiation and chemo.  While I don’t have survivor’s guilt (yet), it isn’t fun.

Reading and thinking about molecular biology has been a form of psychotherapy for me (for why, see the reprint of an old post on this point at the end).

Consider ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Lou Gehrig disease).  What needs explaining is not why my classmate got it, but why we all don’t have it.  As you know human neurons don’t replace themselves (forget the work in animals — it doesn’t apply to us).  Just think what the neurons  which die in ALS have to do.  They have to send a single axon several feet (not nanoMeters, microMeters, milliMeters — but the better part of a meter) from their cell bodies in the spinal cord to the muscle the innervate (which could be in your foot).

Supplying the end of the axon with proteins and other molecules by simple diffusion would never work.  So molecular highways (called microtubules) inside the axon are constructed, along which trucks (molecular motors such as kinesin and dynein) drag cargos of proteins, and mRNAs to make more proteins.

We know a lot about microtubules, and Cell vol. 179 pp. 909 – 922 ’19 gives incredible detail about them (even better with lots of great pictures).  Start with the basic building block — the tubulin heterodimer — about 40 Angstroms wide and 80 Angstroms high.  The repeating unit of the microtubule is 960 Angstroms long, so 12 heterodimers are lined up end to end in each repeating unit — this is the protofilament of the microtubule, and our microtubules have 13 of them, so that’s 156 heterodimers per microtubule repeat length which is 960 Angstroms or 96 nanoMeters (96 billionths of a meter).  So a microtubule (or a bunch of microtubules extending a meter has 10^7 such repeats or about 1 billion heterodimers.  But the axon of a motor neuron has a bunch of microtubules in it (between 10 and 100), so the motor neuron firing to  the muscle moving my finger has probably made billions and billions of heterodimers.  Moreover it’s been doing this for 80 plus years.

This is why, what needs explaining is not ALS, but why we don’t all have it.

Here’s the old post

The Solace of Molecular Biology

Neurology is fascinating because it deals with illnesses affecting what makes us human. Unfortunately for nearly all of my medical career in neurology ’62 – ’00 neurologic therapy was lousy and death was no stranger. In a coverage group with 4 other neurologists taking weekend call (we covered our own practices during the week) about 1/4 of the patients seen on call weekend #1 had died by on call weekend #2 five weeks later.

Most of the deaths were in the elderly with strokes, tumors, cancer etc, but not all. I also ran a muscular dystrophy clinic and one of the hardest cases I saw was an infant with Werdnig Hoffman disease — similar to what Steven Hawking has, but much, much faster — she died at 1 year. Initially, I found the suffering of such patients and their families impossible to accept or understand, particularly when they affected the young, or even young adults in the graduate student age.

As noted earlier, I started med school in ’62, a time when the genetic code was first being cracked, and with the background then that many of you have presently understanding molecular biology as it was being unravelled wasn’t difficult. Usually when you know something you tend to regard it as simple or unimpressive. Not so the cell and life. The more you know, the more impressive it becomes.

Think of the 3.2 gigaBases of DNA in each cell. At 3 or so Angstroms aromatic ring thickness — this comes out to a meter or so stretched out — but it isn’t, rather compressed so it fits into a nucleus 5 – 10 millionths of a meter in diameter. Then since DNA is a helix with one complete turn every 10 bases, the genome in each cell contains 320,000,000 twists which must be unwound to copy it into RNA. The machinery which copies it into messenger RNA (RNA polymerase II) is huge — but the fun doesn’t stop there — in the eukaryotic cell to turn on a gene at the right time something called the mediator complex must bind to another site in the DNA and the RNA polymerase — the whole mess contains over 100 proteins and has a molecular mass of over 2 megaDaltons (with our friend carbon containing only 12 Daltons). This monster must somehow find and unwind just the right stretch of DNA in the extremely cramped confines of the nucleus. That’s just transcription of DNA into RNA. Translation of the messenger RNA (mRNA) into protein involves another monster — the ribosome. Most of our mRNA must be processed lopping out irrelevant pieces before it gets out to the cytoplasm — this calls for the spliceosome — a complex of over 100 proteins plus some RNAs — a completely different molecular machine with a mass in the megaDaltons. There’s tons more that we know now, equally complex.

So what.

Gradually I came to realize that what needs explaining is not the poor child dying of Werdnig Hoffman disease but that we exist at all and for fairly prolonged periods of time and in relatively good shape (like my father who was actively engaged in the law and a mortgage operation until 6 months before his death at age100). Such is the solace of molecular biology. It ain’t much, but it’s all I’ve got (the religious have a lot more). You guys have the chemical background and the intellectual horsepower to understand molecular biology — and even perhaps to extend it.

 

Is the microtubule alive ??

When does inanimate matter become animate?  How about cilia — they beat and move around.  No one would call  the alpha/beta tubulin dimer from which they are formed alive.  The tubulin proteins contain 450 amino acids or so and form a globule 40 Angstroms (4 nanoMeters) in diameter.  The dimer is then 40 x 80 Angstroms and looks like an oil drum.  Then they form protofilaments stacked end to end — e.g. alpha beta alpha beta.  Then 13 protofilaments then align side by side to form the microtubule (which is 250 Angstroms in diameter, with a central hole about half that size.  Do you think you could design a protein to do this?

Lets make it a bit more complicated, and add another 10 protofilaments forming a second incomplete ring.  This is the microtubule doublet, and each cilium has 9 of them all arranged in a circle.

Hopefully you have access to the 31 October cell where the repeating unit of the microtubule doublet is shown in exquisite detail — https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674%2819%2931081-5. — Cell 179, 909–922 ’19

The structure is from the primitive eukaryote Chlamydomonas, the structure repeats every 960 Angstroms (e.g every 12 alpha/beta tubulin dimers).  So just for one repeating unit which is just under 1/10 of a micron (10,000 Angstroms) there are (13 + 10) * 12 = 276 dimers.  The cilium is 12 microns long so that’s 12 * 276 * 100 = 298,080 alpha tubulin dimers/microtubule doublet. The cilium has 9 of these + another doublet in the center, so thats 2,980,800 alpha tubulin dimers/cilium.

The cell article is far better than this, because it shows how the motor proteins which climb along the outside of the doublet (such as dynein) attach.The article also describes the molecular ruler (basically a 960 Angstrom coil coil which spans the repeat. They found some 38 different proteins associated with the microtubule repeat.  They repeat as well at 80, 160, 240, 480 and 960 Angstrom periodicity.  The proteins in the hole in the center of the microtubule (e.g. the lumen) are rich in a protein module called the EF hand which binds calcium, and which likely causes movement of the microtubule, at which point the damn thing (whose structure we now know) appears alive.

Because of the attachment of the partial ring (B ring) to the complete ring of protofilaments, each of the 23 protofilaments has a unique position in the doublet, and each of the proteins in the lumen is bound to a specific mitotubule profilament. There are 6 different coiled coil proteins inside the A ring, occupying  specific furrows between the protofilaments.

Staggering complexity built from a simple subunit, but then Monticello is only made of bricks.

The uses of disorder

There was a lot of shock and awe about a report showing how seemingly minor changes in an aliphatic group on benzene led to markedly different conformations in its protein target (lysozyme from bacteriophage T4) http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2015/06/18/tiny_and_not_so_tiny_changes.php.

Our noses are being rubbed in just how floppy proteins are, in contrast to the first glimpses of protein structure obtained by Xray crystallography. Back then we knew so little about proteins, that seeing all the atoms laid out in alpha helices and beta sheets was incredibly compelling. We talked about the structure of a protein rather than a structure. Even back then, with hemoglobin (one of the first solved proteins) it was obvious that proteins had to have more than one structure. The porphyrin ring in heme that oxygen binds to is buried deep in hemoglobin, and the initial structure had to move in some way to allow oxygen to find its way in (because the initial structure showed no obvious channel for oxygen). So hemoglobin had to breathe.

We now know that many proteins have intrinsically disordered segments. Amazingly, the most recent estimate I could find in my notes (or in Wikipedia) is this — It is estimated that over 30% of eukaryotic proteins have stretches of over 30 amino acids that are intrinsically disordered [ J. Mol. Biol. vol. 337 pp. 635 – 645 ’04 ]. Does anyone out there know of more recent data?

We’re a lot smarter now — here’s a comment on Derek’s post — “I have always thought crystal structures of proteins/enzymes are more a guide than actually useful. You are crystallizing a protein first-proteins don’t pack like that in vivo. Then you are settling on the conformation that freezes out- is this the lowest energy form? Then you are ignoring hte fact that these are highly dynamic structures that are constantly moving, sliding, shaking, adjusting. Then if you put a ligand in there you get the lowest energy form-which is what it would look like after reaction and before ligand dissociation- this is quite different from what it can look like at other stages of the reaction.”

Here is an interesting example of the uses of protein disorder going on right now in just about every neuron in your body. Most neurons have long processes, far too long for diffusion to move a needed protein to their ends. For that purpose we have microtubules (aka neurotubules in neurons) stretching the length of the processes, onto which two types of motors attach (dyneins which moves things to negative end of the microtubule and kinesins which move things to the positive end).

The microtubule is built from a heterodimer of two proteins (alpha and beta tubulin). Each contains about 450 amino acids and forms a globule 40 Angstroms (4 nanoMeters) in diameter. The heterodimers pack end to end to form a protofilament. 13 protofilaments line up side by side to form the microtubule, a hollow structure about 250 Angstroms in diameter. In cells microtubules are 1 to 10 microns long, but in nerve process they can be ‘up to’ 100 microns in length. Even at 1 micron (1,000 nanoMeters) that’s 13 * 250 heterodimers in a microtubule.

Any protein structure this important has a lot of modifications imposed on it to alter structure and function. Examples include phosphorylation and the addition of glutamic acid chains (polyglutamylation). The carboxy terminal tails of alpha and beta tubulin are flexible and stick out from the tubulin rod (which is why they aren’t seen on Xray crystallography). The carboxy terminal tail is the site of post-translational glutamylation. The enzyme polyglutamylating the carboxy terminal tail of beta tubular is TTLL7 (you don’t want to know what the acronym stands for). It binds to the alpha/beta tubular heterodimer by an intrinsically disordered region of its own (becoming structured in the process), then it binds to the intrinsically disordered carboxyl terminal tails, structuring them and modifying them. It’s basically a mating dance. There is a precedent for this — see https://luysii.wordpress.com/2013/12/29/the-mating-dance-of-a-promiscuous-protein/

So disordered regions of proteins although structureless are far from functionless