Propagation of the Allosteric Modulation Induced by Sodium in the δ-Opioid Receptor.

Allosteric sodium in the helix bundle of a G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) can modulate the receptor activation on the intracellular side. This phenomenon has confounded the GPCR community for decades. In this work, we present a theoretical model that reveals the mechanism of the allosteric modulation induced by sodium in the δ-opioid receptor. We found that the allosteric sodium ion exploits a distinct conformation of the key residue Trp2746.48 to propagate the modulation to helices 5 and 6…

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A Maximum-Caliber Approach to Predicting Perturbed Folding Kinetics Due to Mutations.

We present a maximum-caliber method for inferring transition rates of a Markov state model (MSM) with perturbed equilibrium populations given estimates of state populations and rates for an unperturbed MSM. It is similar in spirit to previous approaches, but given the inclusion of prior information, it is more robust and simple to implement. We examine its performance in simple biased diffusion models of kinetics and then apply the method to predicting changes in folding rates for several high…

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