Identification of property outliers among ALS-associated SOD1 mutations : Common effect on surface hydrogen bonds

• In good accord with the protein-aggregation hypothesis for neurodegenerative diseaseALS-associated SOD1 mutations are found to reduce structural stability or netrepulsive charge. Moreover there are weak indications that the ALS diseaseprogression is correlated with the degree of mutational impact on the SOD1 structure.A bottleneck for obtaining more conclusive information about these structure-diseaserelationships, however, is the large intrinsic variability in patient survival times andinsufficient disease statistics for the majority of ALS-provoking mutations. As analternative test of the structure-disease relationship we focus here on the SOD1 amutation that appears to be outliers in the data set. The results identify several ALSprovokingmutations whose only effect on apo SOD1 is the elimination orintroduction of a single charge, i.e., D76V/Y, D101N and N139D/K. Thethermodynamic stability and folding behaviour of these mutants are indistinguishablefrom the wildtype control, showing that structurally benign replacements of individualsurface charges are sufficient to trigger ALS. Moreover, D101N is a clear outlier inthe plot of stability loss vs. patient survival time by having too rapid diseaseprogression. Common to the identified mutations is that they truncate conserved saltlinksand/or H-bond networks in the functional loops IV or VII. The results show thatthe local impact of ALS-associated mutations on the SOD1 molecule can sometimesoverrun their global effects on stability and net repulsive charge, and point at theanalysis of property outliers as an efficient strategy for mapping out new ALSprovokingfeatures.

Ämnesord

MEDICIN OCH HÄLSOVETENSKAP  -- Medicinsk bioteknologi -- Medicinsk bioteknologi (hsv//swe)

MEDICAL AND HEALTH SCIENCES  -- Medical Biotechnology -- Medical Biotechnology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Biochemistry

Biokemi

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