Single Molecule FRET Investigation of the Dimensions and Dynamics in Highly Cooperative Sic1-WD40 Binding

Sic1 is a cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor which must be phosphorylated on at least six sites (termed Cdc4 phosphodegrons, CPDs) to allow its recognition by the WD40 binding domain of Cdc4. The highly-cooperative switch-like dependence on the number of phosphorylated sites on Sic1 cannot be accounted for by traditional thermodynamic models of cooperativity. Further experimental attention is necessary to determine the physicochemical/mechanistic basis of its highly cooperative binding.We used single molecule fluorescence techniques to study the dimensions and dynamics of Sic1's N-terminal targeting region (residues 1-90, henceforth Sic1), phosphorylated Sic1 (pSic1), and the pSic1-WD40 dynamic complex.Previous single molecule Fӧrster Resonance Energy Transfer (smFRET) measurements [Liu, 2014] observed end-to-end reconfiguration on timescales larger than ∼1ms; resulting in FRET histograms with multiple conformational sub-ensembles. Sic1, pSic1, and the pSic1-WD40 complex are examined using smFRET to study the dynamics and dimensions of the various sub-ensembles. In a refinement to the conventional approaches for inferring dimensions from smFRET experiments, we use distance distributions from Monte Carlo simulations which extensively sample coarse-grained protein conformations. The application of polymer physics theory/simulation towards smFRET data interpretation, and towards IDP binding, contributes to the growing toolkit for understanding the diverse behaviours of IDPs.