New progress in the study of sequence effect in peptide assembly

Recently, researchers from the National Center for nanoscience and Fudan University jointly published a research paper entitled "sequence effects on adequate assembly characteristics observed by using scanning tunneling microscopy" (J am Chem SOC., 2013, 135, 2181) The influence of amino acid sequence on the structure and stability of peptide assembly was studied by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) Researchers from the National Center for nanoscience have published a series of works on the assembly and regulation of peptides at the single molecule level by using STM technology In 2011, they identified the core segments and folding sites for the assembly and aggregation of amyloid peptides by using STM, providing a novel analytical method for studying the assembly structure of amorphous proteins (proc Natl Acad SCI USA, 2011, 108, However, due to the diversity of the surface assembly conformation and the difference of the adsorption stability of peptides, it is still a great challenge to recognize the amino acid sequence in peptides by STM In this study, using STM binding molecular dynamics simulation, we studied the influence of amino acid residues sequence on the stability of Adsorption Conformation of block model polypeptide on the solid surface, and found that the contrast difference in STM image is related to the sequence in model polypeptide At the same time, molecular dynamics simulation found that the binding energy difference and contrast difference between different amino acid residues and graphite surface The difference also has consistency, which indicates the influence of peptide sequence on assembly conformation and assembly characteristics, and suggests the possibility of using STM to recognize peptide sequence This study is helpful to understand the influence of side group structure and sequence on the assembly process, assembly driving force and assembly structure This work has been supported by the major research plan of the Ministry of science and technology and the major research plan of the NSFC (source: National Nano Science Center)