Elucidation of solvent exposure, side-chain reactivity, and steric demands of the trifluoromethionine residue in a recombinant protein.

Abstract

When incorporated into proteins, fluorinated amino acids have been utilized as 19F NMR probes of protein structure and protein-ligand interactions, and as subtle structural replacements for their parent amino acids which is not possible using the standard 20-amino acid repertoire. Recent investigations have shown the ability of various fluorinated methionines, such as difluoromethionine (DFM) and trifluoromethionine (TFM), to be bioincorporated into recombinant proteins and to be extremely useful as 19F NMR biophysical probes. Interestingly, in the case of the bacteriophage lambda lysozyme (LaL) which contains only three Met residues (at positions 1, 14, and 107), four 19F NMR resonances are observed when TFM is incorporated into LaL. To elucidate the underlying structural reasons for this anomalous observation and to more fully explore the effect of TFM on protein structure, site-directed mutagenesis was used to assign each 19F NMR resonance. Incorporation of TFM into the M14L mutant resulted in the collapse of the two 19F resonances associated with TFM at position 107 into a single resonance, suggesting that when position 14 in wild-type protein contains TFM, a subtle but different environment exists for the methionine at position 107. In addition, 19F and [1H-13C]-HMQC NMR experiments have been utilized with paramagnetic line broadening and K2PtCl4 reactivity experiments to obtain information about the probable spatial position of each Met in the protein. These results are compared with the recently determined crystal structure of LaL and allow for a more detailed structural explanation for the effect of fluorination on protein structure.