Diffusion NMR study of complex formation in membrane-associated peptides

TL;DR

This study uses PFG-NMR to measure the hydrodynamic size of peptide-surfactant complexes, revealing size changes with SDS concentration and providing insights into complex formation in membrane-associated peptides.

Contribution

It introduces a method to accurately determine the size of peptide-micelle complexes using diffusion NMR, highlighting size variations with SDS concentration.

Findings

Complex size is approximately 5.5 nm at low SDS concentrations.

Complex size increases nearly twofold at intermediate SDS levels.

Diffusion coefficients differ for SDS with and without buffer at low concentrations.

Abstract

Pulsed-field-gradient nuclear magnetic resonance (PFG-NMR) is used to obtain the true hydrodynamic size of complexes of peptides with sodium dodecyl sulfate SDS micelles. The peptide used in this study is a 19-residue antimicrobial peptide, GAD-2. Two smaller dipeptides, alanine-glycine (Ala-Gly) and tyrosine-leucine (Tyr-Leu), are used for comparison. We use PFG-NMR to simultaneously measure diffusion coefficients of both peptide and surfactant. These two inputs, as a function of SDS concentration, are then fit to a simple two species model that neglects hydrodynamic interactions between complexes. From this we obtain the fraction of free SDS, and the hydrodynamic size of complexes in a GAD-2--SDS system as a function of SDS concentration. These results are compared to those for smaller dipeptides and for peptide-free solutions. At low SDS concentrations ([SDS] $\leq$ 25 mM), the results self-consistently point to a GAD-2--SDS complex of fixed hydrodynamic size R =(5.5 $\pm$ 0.3) nm. At intermediate SDS concentrations (25 mM $<$ [SDS] $<$ 60 mM), the apparent size of a GAD-2--SDS complex shows almost a factor of two increase without a significant change in surfactant-to-peptide ratio within a complex, most likely implying an increase in the number of peptides in a complex. For peptide-free solutions, the self-diffusion coefficients of SDS with and without buffer are significantly different at low SDS concentrations but merge above [SDS]=60 mM. We find that in order to obtain unambiguous information about the hydrodynamic size of a peptide-surfactant complex from diffusion measurements, experiments must be carried out at or below [SDS] = 25 mM.