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  • Title: Opposing Intermolecular Tuning of Ca2+ Affinity for Calmodulin by Neurogranin and CaMKII Peptides.
    Author: Zhang P, Tripathi S, Trinh H, Cheung MS.
    Journal: Biophys J; 2017 Mar 28; 112(6):1105-1119. PubMed ID: 28355539.
    Abstract:
    We investigated the impact of bound calmodulin (CaM)-target compound structure on the affinity of calcium (Ca2+) by integrating coarse-grained models and all-atomistic simulations with nonequilibrium physics. We focused on binding between CaM and two specific targets, Ca2+/CaM-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII) and neurogranin (Ng), as they both regulate CaM-dependent Ca2+ signaling pathways in neurons. It was shown experimentally that Ca2+/CaM (holoCaM) binds to the CaMKII peptide with overwhelmingly higher affinity than Ca2+-free CaM (apoCaM); the binding of CaMKII peptide to CaM in return increases the Ca2+ affinity for CaM. However, this reciprocal relation was not observed in the Ng peptide (Ng13-49), which binds to apoCaM or holoCaM with binding affinities of the same order of magnitude. Unlike the holoCaM-CaMKII peptide, whose structure can be determined by crystallography, the structural description of the apoCaM-Ng13-49 is unknown due to low binding affinity, therefore we computationally generated an ensemble of apoCaM-Ng13-49 structures by matching the changes in the chemical shifts of CaM upon Ng13-49 binding from nuclear magnetic resonance experiments. Next, we computed the changes in Ca2+ affinity for CaM with and without binding targets in atomistic models using Jarzynski's equality. We discovered the molecular underpinnings of lowered affinity of Ca2+ for CaM in the presence of Ng13-49 by showing that the N-terminal acidic region of Ng peptide pries open the β-sheet structure between the Ca2+ binding loops particularly at C-domain of CaM, enabling Ca2+ release. In contrast, CaMKII peptide increases Ca2+ affinity for the C-domain of CaM by stabilizing the two Ca2+ binding loops. We speculate that the distinctive structural difference in the bound complexes of apoCaM-Ng13-49 and holoCaM-CaMKII delineates the importance of CaM's progressive mechanism of target binding on its Ca2+ binding affinities.
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