PNNL

Abstract

We report a single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) and polarization study of conformational dynamics of calmodulin (CaM) interacting with a target peptide, C28W of 28 amino-acid oligomer. The C28W peptide represents the essential binding sequence domain of the Ca-ATPase protein interacting with CaM, which is important in cellular signaling for the regulation of energy in metabolism. However, the mechanism of the CaM-C28W recognition complex formation is still unclear. The amino-terminal (N-terminal) domain of the CaM was labeled with a fluorescein-based arsenical hairpin binder (F1AsH) that enables our unambiguously probing the CaM N-terminal target-binding domain motions at a millisecond timescale without convolution of the probe-dye random motions. By analyzing the distribution of FRET efficiency between F1AsH labeled CaM and Texas Red labeled C28W and the polarization fluctuation dynamics and distributions of the CaM N-terminal domain, we reveal slow (at sub-second time scale) binding-unbinding motions of the N-terminal domain of the CaM in CaM-C28W complexes, which is a strong evidence of a two-state binding interaction of CaM-mediated cell signaling.