Secondary structure - terms

See also Secondary Structure (General), Secondary Structure (Terms), Secondary Structures (Specific examples). Factors Determining Secondary and Tertiary Structure, Sheet, Keratin,... 

See also Ramachandran Plots, Secondary Structure (General), Secondary Structure (Terms)... 

The essential distinction between the approaches used to formulate and evaluate proteins, compared with conventional low molecular weight drugs, lies in the need to maintain several levels of protein structure and the unique chemical and physical properties that these higher-order structures convey. Proteins are condensation polymers of amino acids, joined by peptide bonds. The levels of protein architecture are typically described in terms of the four orders of structure [23,24] depicted in Fig. 2. The primary structure refers to the sequence of amino acids and the location of any disulfide bonds. Secondary structure is derived from the steric relations of amino acid residues that are close to one another. The alpha-helix and beta-pleated sheet are examples of periodic secondary structure. Tertiary... 

Traditionally, G-proteins have been classified in terms of the effector coupling of the a subunit. In spite of the facts that (1) this predates information on primary and secondary structure from cloning work, and (2) the fly subunits are also involved in effector coupling, this classification is still quite useful. 

Determination of protein secondary structure has long been a major application of optical spectroscopic studies of biopolymers (Fasman, 1996 Havel, 1996 Mantsch and Chapman, 1996). These efforts have primarily sought to determine the average fractional amount of overall secondary structure, typically represented as helix and sheet contributions, which comprise the extended, coherent structural elements in well-structured proteins. In some cases further interpretations in terms of turns and specific helix and sheet segment types have developed. Only more limited applications of optical spectra to determination of tertiary structure have appeared, and these normally have used fluorescence or near-UV electronic circular dichroism (ECD) of aromatic residues to sense a change in the fold (Haas, 1995 Woody and Dunker, 1996). 

The above peptide results established general patterns that are apparent in protein spectra. However, most proteins differ from small peptides in terms of the degree of solvation and the uniformity of secondary structure segments. Although a peptide helix may terminate in a large... 

Quantitative analysis of protein IR and VCD spectra in terms of the fractional components (FC) of their secondary structure has taken different approaches, as noted earlier. The FTIR approach of assigning frequencies to specific components can, in principle, identify amounts of unordered structure in a protein fold. The viability of this approach... 

Our band shape methods have made use of the principal component method of factor analysis (Pancoska etal., 1979 Malinowski, 1991) to characterize the protein spectra in terms of a relatively small number of coefficients (loadings) (Pancoska et al., 1994 1995 Baumruk et al., 1996). This approach is similar, in its initial stages, to various methods (Selcon, Variselect, etc.) that have been used for determining protein secondary structure from ECD data (Hennessey and Johnson, 1981 Provencher and Glockner, 1981 Johnson, 1988 Pancoska and Keiderling, 1991 Sreerama and Woody, 1993, 1994 Venyaminov and Yang, 1996). At this point, one can say these traditional quantitative methods have had little impact upon structural studies of denatured proteins. 

Bovine a -lactalbumin (BLA) is a protein whose structure appears to be unusually malleable and, as such, has been the focus of many studies of what is termed the molten globule transition. At low pH, BLA expands and is said to lose tertiary structure, but it maintains substantial secondary structure in a partial unfolding transition (molten globule... 

On a larger scale, the unique folding and structure of one complete polypeptide chain is termed the tertiary structure of protein molecules. The difference between local secondary structure and complete polypeptide tertiary structure is arbitrary and sometimes of little practical difference. 

Upon biosynthesis, a polypeptide folds into its native conformation, which is structurally stable and functionally active. The conformation adopted ultimately depends upon the polypeptide s amino acid sequence, explaining why different polypeptide types have different characteristic conformations. We have previously noted that stretches of secondary structure are stabilized by short-range interactions between adjacent amino acid residues. Tertiary structure, on the other hand, is stabilized by interactions between amino acid residues that may be far apart from each other in terms of amino acid sequence, but which are brought into close proximity by protein folding. The major stabilizing forces of a polypeptide s overall conformation are ... 

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