LAUSR

In many tissues and organisms, large amount of urea gets accumulated to maintain osmotic balance. To evade the threatening impact of urea, living organisms accumulate methylamines, a class of osmolytes, in proportion of 2:1 (urea:methylamine). To understand underlying cause(s) for protein-specific counteraction behavior, thermodynamic stability (ΔGDo) of three disulfide free proteins (myoglobin, bovine cytochrome c and barstar) in the mixture of urea and methylamine has been estimated from guanidinium chloride-(GdmCl) driven denaturation curves. Using the experimentally measured values of ΔGDo obtained in the presence of individual methylamines and urea, we predicted the molar ratio of urea and a methylamine required for perfect compensation for each of the proteins. Interestingly, for all proteins studied, a similar ratio has been observed for perfect compensation. The predicted ratio for perfect compensation in terms of thermodynamic parameters was about 2:1 M ratio of urea to methylamine. Furthermore, a partial counteraction was observed in the myoglobin and barstar. However, for bovine cytochrome c, perfect compensation was observed in both GdmCl- and heat-driven denaturations. Our observations clearly suggest that the counteraction phenomenon depends on the extent of the unfolding of the denatured states of proteins.