The methanol-induced conformational transitions of β-lactoglobulin, cytochrome<i>c</i>, and ubiquitin at low pH: A study by electrospray ionization mass spectrometry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The methanol-induced conformational transitions under acidic conditions for beta-lactoglobulin, cytochrome c, and ubiquitin, representing three different classes of proteins with beta-sheets, alpha-helices, and both alpha-helices and beta-sheets, respectively, are studied under equilibrium conditions by electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS). The folding states of proteins in solution are monitored by the charge state distributions that they produce during ESI and by hydrogen/deuterium (H/D) exchange followed by ESI-MS. The changes in charge state distributions are correlated with earlier studies by optical and other methods which have shown that, in methanol, these proteins form partially unfolded intermediates with induced alpha-helix structure. Intermediate states formed at about 35% methanol concentration are found to give bimodal charge state distributions. The same rate of H/D exchange is shown by the two contributions to the bimodal distributions. This suggests the intermediates are highly flexible and may consist of a mixture of two or more rapidly interconverting conformers. H/D exchange of proteins followed by ESI-MS shows that helical denatured states, populated at around 50% methanol concentration, transform into more protected structures with further increases in methanol concentration, consistent with previous circular dicroism studies. These more protected structures still produce high charge states in ESI, similar to those of the fully denatured proteins.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".