Thermal expansivities of peptides, polypeptides and proteins as measured by pressure perturbation calorimetry

• We present a PPC study to address correlations between thermal expansivity and polypeptide conformation.
• Variations in thermal expansivity with conformation of polypeptide chain are established.
• Thermal expansivity can be used as a proxy to assess the collapse of polypeptide chains.

The main goal of this work was to provide direct experimental evidence that the expansivity of peptides, polypeptides and proteins as measured by pressure perturbation calorimetry (PPC), can serve as a proxy to characterize relative compactness of proteins, especially the denatured state ensemble. This is very important as currently only small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), intrinsic viscosity and, to a lesser degree, fluorescence resonance transfer (FRET) experiments are capable of reporting on the compactness of denatured state ensembles. We combined the expansivity measurements with other biophysical methods (far-UV circular dichroism spectroscopy, differential scanning calorimetry, and small angle X-ray scattering). Three case studies of the effects of conformational changes on the expansivity of polypeptides in solution are presented. We have shown that expansivity appears to be insensitive to the helix–coil transition, and appears to reflect the changes in hydration of the side-chains. We also observed that the expansivity is sensitive to the global conformation of the polypeptide chain and thus can be potentially used to probe hydration of different collapsed states of denatured or even intrinsically disordered proteins.

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