Inter-helical Interactions in Membrane Proteins: Analysis Based on the Local Backbone Geometry and the Side Chain Interactions

Abstract

The availability of a significant number of the structures of helical membrane proteins has prompted us to investigate the mode of helix-helix packing. In the present study, we have considered a dataset of alpha-helical membrane proteins representing structures solved from all the known superfamilies. We have described the geometry of all the helical residues in terms of local coordinate axis at the backbone level. Significant inter-helical interactions have been considered as contacts by weighing the number of atom-atom contacts, including all the side-chain atoms. Such a definition of local axis and the contact criterion has allowed us to investigate the inter-helical interaction in a systematic and quantitative manner. We show that a single parameter (designated as alpha), which is derived from the parameters representing the mutual orientation of local axes, is able to accurately capture the details of helix-helix interaction. The analysis has been carried out by dividing the dataset into parallel, anti-parallel, and perpendicular orientation of helices. The study indicates that a specific range of alpha value is preferred for interactions among the anti-parallel helices. Such a preference is also seen among interacting residues of parallel helices, however to a lesser extent. No such preference is seen in the case of perpendicular helices, the contacts that arise mainly due to the interaction of surface helices with the end of the trans-membrane helices. The study supports the prevailing view that the anti-parallel helices are well packed. However, the interactions between helices of parallel orientation are non-trivial. The packing in alpha-helical membrane proteins, which is systematically and rigorously investigated in this study, may prove to be useful in modeling of helical membrane proteins.