Molecular Dynamics Simulations Highlight Mobile Regions in Proteins: A Novel Suggestion for Converting a Murine VH Domain into a More Tractable Species

The VH region of the murine antibody 1F7 has been identified as a single-domain chorismate mutase, but a tendency to denature and aggregate has hampered its biochemical characterization. Standard mutagenesis approaches targeting antibody chain dimerization areas have been exhausted. We describe a new approach to the problem, where we use molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to find the differences between the untractable protein and the known soluble VH domain from a llama antibody. MD simulations of proteins yield information on the relative stability and fluctuations of parts of the proteins. By comparing simulation results of two related proteins their differences in stability and fluctuations can be analyzed and may suggest mutations aimed at (de)stabilization of one of the two proteins. For the mouse versus llama simulations, this approach highlights an untried area in the protein which shows increased fluctuations. The replacement of this eight-residue segment with the corresponding llama sequence gave a chimeric mutant which shows significantly decreased fluctuations. We see this as a general scheme to generate suggestions for mutagenesis experiments, not only obviously generalizable to other immunoglobulin domains, but to other protein systems as well.