Molecular Dynamics Optimization of a Computational Model of TACE and its Substrate Peptide

Abstract

Tumor necrosis factor-alpha converting enzyme (TACE) is a very important membrane-bound proteinase, and it can cut a lot of membrane proteins to their released form. Many of the substrates of TACE are critical protein factors, such as IL-6, TNF-alpha, EGF receptor. Therefore, TACE has been a hopeful drug targets in many diseases. However, selective inhibitors against TACE with high specificity has yet been developed successfully, partly due to the lack of the understanding of the TACE substrate interaction details. To solve this problem, here we build a computational complex model of the TACE catalytic domain and its substrate peptide using the protein design software Rosetta. To further optimize the complex model, molecular dynamics analysis was performed in NAMD with explicit water molecules. The result showed that our complex model is a pretty reliable intermediate model for TACE and its peptide substrate. This complex model could be very useful for further study of the substrate specificity and selectivity of TACE.