How Aberrant N-Glycosylation Can Alter Protein Functionality and Ligand Binding: an Atomistic View

Protein assembly defects due to enrichment of aberrant conformational variants of proteins are emerging as a new frontier in therapeutics design. Understanding, atomistically, structural elements that remodel the energy landscape of proteins, with the consequence of rewiring the conformational dynamics of proteins and pathologically perturbing functionally-oriented ensembles, is key for development of inhibitors. This is particularly relevant for molecular chaperones, hub proteins for the assembly of large multiprotein complexes, where enrichment of aberrant conformers can have a large impact on the cellular proteome, and in turn, on phenotypes. Here, we integrate computational and experimental tools to unveil how N-glycosylation of specific residues in glucose-regulated protein 94 (GRP94) modulates internal dynamics and alters the conformational fitness of regions fundamental for interaction with the nucleotide and synthetic ligands, and impacts substructures dedicated to recognition of interacting proteins. We show how N-glycosylation plays an active role in modulating the energy landscape of the protein, with specific glycosylation patterns determining specific functionally-oriented dynamic signatures. Our results provide support for leveraging the structural-dynamics knowledge on distinct glycosylation variants to design molecules targeting GRP94 disease-associated conformational states and assemblies. Since glycosylation is the most abundant form of post-translational modification, our results and mechanistic models can readily be transferred to other targets and contexts for cancers and other diseases.