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Jeffrey B Endelman

Publications and source records attributed to Jeffrey B Endelman.

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Structure-guided recombination creates an artificial family of cytochromes P450.

Creating artificial protein families affords new opportunities to explore the determinants of structure and biological function free from many of the constraints of natural selection. We have created an artificial family comprising 3,000 P450 heme proteins that correctly fold and incorporate a heme cofactor by recombining three cytochromes P450 at seven crossover locations chosen to minimize structural disruption. Members of this protein family differ from any known sequence at an average of 72 and by as many as 109 amino acids. Most (>73%) of the properly folded chimeric P450 heme proteins are catalytically active peroxygenases; some are more thermostable than the parent proteins. A multiple sequence alignment of 955 chimeras, including both folded and not, is a valuable resource for sequence-structure-function studies. Logistic regression analysis of the multiple sequence alignment identifies key structural contributions to cytochrome P450 heme incorporation and peroxygenase activity and suggests possible structural differences between parents CYP102A1 and CYP102A2.

Amino Acid Sequence↗

Site-directed protein recombination as a shortest-path problem.

Protein function can be tuned using laboratory evolution, in which one rapidly searches through a library of proteins for the properties of interest. In site-directed recombination, n crossovers are chosen in an alignment of p parents to define a set of p(n + 1) peptide fragments. These fragments are then assembled combinatorially to create a library of p(n+1) proteins. We have developed a computational algorithm to enrich these libraries in folded proteins while maintaining an appropriate level of diversity for evolution. For a given set of parents, our algorithm selects crossovers that minimize the average energy of the library, subject to constraints on the length of each fragment. This problem is equivalent to finding the shortest path between nodes in a network, for which the global minimum can be found efficiently. Our algorithm has a running time of O(N(3)p(2) + N(2)n) for a protein of length N. Adjusting the constraints on fragment length generates a set of optimized libraries with varying degrees of diversity. By comparing these optima for different sets of parents, we rapidly determine which parents yield the lowest energy libraries.

Algorithms↗

Functional evolution and structural conservation in chimeric cytochromes p450: calibrating a structure-guided approach.

Recombination generates chimeric proteins whose ability to fold depends on minimizing structural perturbations that result when portions of the sequence are inherited from different parents. These chimeric sequences can display functional properties characteristic of the parents or acquire entirely new functions. Seventeen chimeras were generated from two CYP102 members of the functionally diverse cytochrome p450 family. Chimeras predicted to have limited structural disruption, as defined by the SCHEMA algorithm, displayed CO binding spectra characteristic of folded p450s. Even this small population exhibited significant functional diversity: chimeras displayed altered substrate specificities, a wide range in thermostabilities, up to a 40-fold increase in peroxidase activity, and ability to hydroxylate a substrate toward which neither parent heme domain shows detectable activity. These results suggest that SCHEMA-guided recombination can be used to generate diverse p450s for exploring function evolution within the p450 structural framework.

Bacillus↗

Library analysis of SCHEMA-guided protein recombination.

The computational algorithm SCHEMA was developed to estimate the disruption caused when amino acid residues that interact in the three-dimensional structure of a protein are inherited from different parents upon recombination. To evaluate how well SCHEMA predicts disruption, we have shuffled the distantly-related beta-lactamases PSE-4 and TEM-1 at 13 sites to create a library of 2(14) (16,384) chimeras and examined which ones retain lactamase function. Sequencing the genes from ampicillin-selected clones revealed that the percentage of functional clones decreased exponentially with increasing calculated disruption (E = the number of residue-residue contacts that are broken upon recombination). We also found that chimeras with low E have a higher probability of maintaining lactamase function than chimeras with the same effective level of mutation but chosen at random from the library. Thus, the simple distance metric used by SCHEMA to identify interactions and compute E allows one to predict which chimera sequences are most likely to retain their function. This approach can be used to evaluate crossover sites for recombination and to create highly mosaic, folded chimeras.

Algorithms↗