Structural and functional analysis of human SOD1 in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

PLoS One. 2013 Dec 2;8(12):e81979. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0081979. eCollection 2013.

Abstract

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal neurodegenerative disease with familial inheritance (fALS) in 5% to 10% of cases; 25% of those are caused by mutations in the superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1) protein. More than 100 mutations in the SOD1 gene have been associated with fALS, altering the geometry of the active site, protein folding and the interaction between monomers. We performed a functional analysis of non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms (nsSNPs) in 124 fALS SOD1 mutants. Eleven different algorithms were used to estimate the functional impact of the replacement of one amino acid on protein structure: SNPs&GO, PolyPhen-2, SNAP, PMUT, Sift, PhD-SNP, nsSNPAnalyzer, TANGO, WALTZ, LIMBO and FoldX. For the structural analysis, theoretical models of 124 SNPs of SOD1 were created by comparative modeling using the MHOLline workflow, which includes Modeller and Procheck. Models were aligned with the native protein by the TM-align algorithm. A human-curated database was developed using the server side include in Java, JMOL. The results of this functional analysis indicate that the majority of the 124 natural mutants are harmful to the protein structure and thus corroborate the correlation between the reported mutations and fALS. In the structural analysis, all models showed conformational changes when compared to wild-type SOD1, and the degree of structural alignment varied between them. The SOD1 database converge structural and functional analyses of SOD1; it is a vast resource for the molecular analysis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which allows the user to expand his knowledge on the molecular basis of the disease. The SOD1 database is available at http://bioinfogroup.com/database.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Amino Acid Sequence
  • Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis / enzymology*
  • Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis / genetics
  • Conserved Sequence
  • Databases, Protein
  • Humans
  • Models, Molecular
  • Molecular Sequence Data
  • Mutation
  • Protein Conformation
  • Sequence Alignment
  • Superoxide Dismutase / chemistry*
  • Superoxide Dismutase / genetics
  • Superoxide Dismutase / metabolism*
  • Superoxide Dismutase-1

Substances

  • SOD1 protein, human
  • Superoxide Dismutase
  • Superoxide Dismutase-1

Grants and funding

LGAM received a fellowship from Faperj (E-26/102.372/2011), LCP and PRD received a fellowship from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State (UNIRIO), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.