Folding and Membrane Insertion of the Pore-Forming Peptide Gramicidin Occur as a Concerted Process

MR Hicks, A Damianoglou, A Rodger, Timothy Dafforn

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle

26 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Many antibiotic peptides function by binding and inserting into membranes. Understanding this process provides an insight into the fundamentals of both membrane protein folding and antibiotic peptide function. For the first time, in this work, flow-aligned linear dichroism (LD) is used to study the folding of the antibiotic peptide gramicidin. LD provides insight into the combined processes of peptide folding and insertion and has the advantage over other similar techniques of being insensitive to off-membrane aggregation events. By combining LD data with conventional measurements of protein fluorescence and circular dichroism, the mechanism of gramicidin insertion is elucidated. The mechanism consists of five separately assignable steps that include formation of a water-insoluble gramicidin aggregate, dissociation from the aggregate, partitioning of peptide to the membrane surface, oligomerisation on the surface and concerted insertion and folding of the peptide to the double-helical form of gramicidin. Measurement of the rates of each step shows that although changes in the fluorescence signal cease 10 s after the initiation of the process, the insertion of the peptide into the membrane is actually not complete for a further 60 min. This last membrane insertion phase is only apparent by measurement of LID and circular dichroism signal changes. In summary, this study demonstrates the importance of multi-technique approaches, including LD, in studies of membrane protein folding. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)358-366
Number of pages9
JournalJournal of Molecular Biology
Volume383
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 7 Nov 2008

Keywords

  • gramicidin
  • membrane protein
  • folding
  • linear dichroism
  • kinetics

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