Bioactive peptides play important roles in metabolic regulation and modulation and many are used as therapeutics. These peptides often possess disulfide bonds, which are important for their structure, function and stability. A systematic network of enzymes--a disulfide bond generating enzyme, a disulfide bond donor enzyme and a redox cofactor--that function inside the cell dictates the formatio...

Direct characterization of peptides with multiple disulfide bonds by mass spectrometry is highly desirable. In this study, electron transfer dissociation (ETD) of peptide disulfide regio-isomers was studied using model peptides containing two intrachain disulfide bonds. ETD provided rich sequence information (c/z ions) even for the backbone region under the coverage of two disulfide bonds. This...

The prediction of the location of disulfide bridges helps towards the solution of protein folding problem. Most of previous works on disulfide connectivity pattern prediction use the prior knowledge of the bonding state of cysteines. In this study an effective method is proposed to predict disulfide connectivity pattern without the prior knowledge of cysteins’bonding state. In previous research...

The regioselective ring opening of styrene oxide using elemental iodine and bromine in the presence of disulfides as new catalysts was studied. The conductivity titration and UV spectroscopy were used to study the interaction of iodine with these catalysts. The results indicate that disulfide 11 is efficient in polyiodide formation, and can catalyze this reaction in excellent yield and high reg...

Disulfide bonds are conserved strongly among proteins of related structure and function. Despite the explosive growth of protein sequence databases and the vast numbers of sequence search tools, no tool exists to draw relations between the disulfide patterns of homologous proteins. We present a comprehensive database of disulfide bonding patterns and a search method to find proteins with simila...

Protein disulfide bond formation contributes to the folding and activity of many exported proteins in bacteria. However, information about disulfide bond formation is limited to only a few bacterial species. We used a multifaceted bioinformatic approach to assess the capacity for disulfide bond formation across this biologically diverse group of organisms. We combined data from a cysteine count...

Protein disulfide bond is formed during post-translational modifications, and has been implicated in various physiological and pathological processes. Proper localization of disulfide bonds also facilitates the prediction of protein three-dimensional (3D) structure. However, it is both time-consuming and labor-intensive using conventional experimental approaches to determine disulfide bonds, es...

Disulfide bonds between the side chains of cysteine residues are the only common crosslinks in proteins. Bovine pancreatic ribonuclease A (RNase A) is a 124-residue enzyme that contains four interweaving disulfide bonds (Cys26-Cys84, Cys40-Cys95, Cys58-Cys110, and Cys65-Cys72) and catalyzes the cleavage of RNA. The contribution of each disulfide bond to the conformational stability and catalyti...

A functional disulfide bond in both the HIV envelope glycoprotein, gp120, and its immune cell receptor, CD4, is involved in viral entry, and compounds that block cleavage of the disulfide bond in these proteins inhibit HIV entry and infection. The disulfide bonds in both proteins are cleaved at the cell surface by the small redox protein, thioredoxin. The target gp120 disulfide and its mechanis...

Correct formation of disulfide bonds is critical for protein folding. We find that cells lacking protein disulfide isomerases (PDIs) can use alternative mechanisms for correct disulfide bond formation. By linking correct disulfide bond formation to antibiotic resistance, we selected mutants that catalyze correct disulfide formation in the absence of DsbC, Escherichia coli's PDI. Most of our mut...