摘要
β-Crystallins are the major structural proteins existing in the vertebrate lens, and their conformational stability is critical in maintaining the life-long transparency and refraction index of the lens. Seven subunits of β-crystallins naturally assemble into various heteroge- neous oligomers with different sizes. Here, we systematically investigated the thermal sta- bility of the different secondary structures present in β-Crystallins and then the dynamic process for the thermal-induced unfolding of β-crystallins by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy-monitored thermal titration and temperature-jump nanosecond time-resolved IR difference absorbance spectra. Our results show that the N-terminal anti-parallel β-sheets in β-crystallin are the most unstable with a transition midpoint temperature at 36.0-2.1℃, leading to the formation of an intermediate consisting vastly of random coil structures. This intermediate structure is temporally assigned to that of the monomer generated by the thermal-induced disassembly of β-crystallin oligomers with a transition midpoint tempera- ture of 40.4-0.7℃. The global unfolding of β-crystallins that leads to denaturation and aggregation indicated by the formation of intermolecular anti-parallel β-sheets has a transi- tion midpoint temperature determined as 72.4-0.2 ℃. Temperature-jump time-resolved IR absorbance difference spectroscopy analysis further reveals that thermal-induced unfolding of β-crystallins occurs firstly in the anti-parallel β-sheets in the N-terminal domains with a time constant of 50 ns.
