Using chemical shifts to generate structural ensembles for intrinsically disordered proteins with converged distributions of secondary structure.

A short segment of the disordered p53 transactivation domain (p53TAD) forms an amphipathic helix when bound to the E3 ubiquitin ligase, MDM2. In the unbound p53TAD, this short segment has transient helical secondary structure. Using a method that combines broad sampling of conformational space with re-weighting, it is shown that it is possible to generate multiple, independent structural ensembles that have highly similar secondary structure distributions for both p53TAD and a P27A mutant. Fractional amounts of transient helical secondary structure were found at the MDM2 binding site that are very similar to estimates based directly on experimental observations. Structures were identified in these ensembles containing segments that are highly similar to short p53 peptides bound to MDM2, even though the ensembles were re-weighted using unbound experimental data. Ensembles were generated using chemical shift data (alpha carbon only, or in combination with other chemical shifts) and cross-validated by predicting residual dipolar couplings. We think this ensemble generator could be used to predict the bound state structure of protein interaction sites in IDPs if there are detectable amounts of matching transient secondary structure in the unbound state.