Rapid Quantification of Protein-Ligand Binding via 19F NMR Lineshape Analysis

Abstract Fluorine incorporation is ideally suited to many NMR techniques and incorporation of fluorine into proteins and fragment libraries for drug discovery has become increasingly common. Here, we use one-dimensional 19F NMR lineshape analysis to quantify the kinetics and equilibrium thermodynamics for the binding of a fluorine-labeled SH3 protein domain to four proline-rich peptides. SH3 domains are one of the largest and most well characterized families of protein recognition domains and have a multitude of functions in eukaryotic cell signaling. First, we showed that fluorine incorporation into SH3 causes only minor structural changes to both the free and bound states using amide proton temperature coefficients. We then compared the results from lineshape analysis of one-dimensional 19F spectra to those from two-dimensional 1H-15N HSQC spectra. Their agreement demonstrates that one-dimensional 19F lineshape analysis is a robust, low-cost, and fast alternative to traditional HSQC-based experiments. The data show that binding is diffusion limited and indicates that the transition state is highly similar to the free state. We also measured binding as a function of temperature. At equilibrium, binding is enthalpically driven and arises from a highly positive activation enthalpy for association with small entropic contributions. Our results agree with those from studies using different techniques, providing additional evidence for the utility of 19F NMR lineshape analysis, and we anticipate that this analysis will be an effective tool for rapidly characterizing the energetics of protein interactions.