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The protein elastin imparts extensibility, elastic recoil, and resilience to tissues including arterial walls, skin, lung alveoli, and the uterus. Elastin and elastin-like peptides are hydrophobic, disordered, and undergo liquid-liquid phase separation upon self-assembly. Despite extensive study, the structure of elastin remains controversial. We use molecular dynamics simulations on a massive scale to elucidate the structural ensemble of aggregated elastin-like peptides. Consistent with the entropic nature of elastic recoil, the aggregated state is stabilized by the hydrophobic effect. However, self-assembly does not entail formation of a hydrophobic core. The polypeptide backbone forms transient, sparse hydrogen-bonded turns and remains significantly hydrated even as self-assembly triples the extent of non-polar side chain contacts. Individual chains in the assembly approach a maximally-disordered, melt-like state which may be called the liquid state of proteins. These findings resolve long-standing controversies regarding elastin structure and function and afford insight into the phase separation of disordered proteins.
Pubmed ID: 29120326
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A software package created to perform molecular dynamics. It is primarily designed for biochemical molecules like proteins, lipids and nucleic acids that have many complicated bonded interactions, but it can also be used for research on non-biological systems, such as polymers.
View all literature mentionsSoftware program that simulates molecular interactions. It has features that allow broad application to many-particle systems with a comprehensive set of energy functions, a variety of enhanced sampling methods, and support for multi-scale techniques, and a range of implicit solvent models. It also primarily targets biological systems including peptides, proteins, prosthetic groups, small molecule ligands, nucleic acids, lipids, and carbohydrates, as they occur in solution, crystals, and membrane environments. CHARMM can also be applied to inorganic materials with applications in materials design and has a comprehensive set of analysis and model builiding tools.
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