Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Phosphorylation-induced Conformational Transitions in the Mycobacterium tuberculosis Response Regulator PrrA

Phosphorylation-activated modulation of response regulators (RR) is predominantly used by bacteria as a strategy in regulating their two-component signaling (TCS) systems, the underlying molecular mechanisms are however far from fully understood. In this work we have conducted a molecular dynamics (MD) simulation of the phosphorylation-induced conformational transitions of RRs with the Mycobacterium Tuberculosis PrrA as a particular example. Starting from the full-length inactive structure of PrrA we introduced a local disturbance by phosphorylating the conserved aspartic acid residue, Asp-58, in the regulatory domain. A Go-model-type algorithm packaged with AMBER force fields was then applied to simulate the dynamics upon phosphorylation. The MD simulation shows that the phosphorylation of Asp-58 facilitates PrrA, whose inactive state has a compact conformation with a closed interdomain interface, to open up with its interdomain separation being increased by an average of about 1.5 {angstrom} for a simulation of 20 ns. The trans-activation loop, which is completely buried within the interdomain interface in the inactive PrrA, is found to become more exposed with the phosphorylated structure as well. These results provide more structural details of how the phosphorylation of a local aspartate activates PrrA to undergo a global conformational rearrangement toward its extended active state. Thismore » work also indicates that MD simulations can serve as a fast tool to unravel the regulation mechanisms of all RRs, which is especially valuable when the structures of full-length active RRs are currently unavailable.« less