Salt bridge (protein)

In chemistry, a salt bridge is a combination of two non-covalent interactions: hydrogen bonding and ionic bonding. Ion pairing is one of the most important noncovalent forces in chemistry, in biological systems, in different materials and in many applications such as ion pair chromatography. It is a most commonly observed contribution to the stability to the entropically unfavorable folded conformation of proteins. Although non-covalent interactions are known to be relatively weak interactions, small stabilizing interactions can add up to make an important contribution to the overall stability of a conformer. Not only are salt bridges found in proteins, but they can also be found in supramolecular chemistry. The thermodynamics of each are explored through experimental procedures to access the free energy contribution of the salt bridge to the overall free energy of the state.

Salt bridges in chemical bonding In water, formation of salt bridges or ion pairs is mostly driven by entropy, usually accompanied by unfavorable ΔH contributions on account of desolvation of the interacting ions upon association. Hydrogen bonds contribute to the stability of ion pairs with e.g. protonated ammonium ions, and with anions is formed by deprotonation as in the case of carboxylate, phosphate etc; then the association constants depend on the pH. Entropic driving forces for ion pairing (in absence of significant H-bonding contributions) are also found in methanol as solvent. In nonpolar solvents contact ion pairs with very high association constants are formed; in the gas phase the association energies of e.g. alkali halides reach up to 200 kJ/mol. The Bjerrum or the Fuoss equation describe ion pair association as function of the ion charges zA and zB and the dielectric constant ε of the medium; a corresponding plot of the stability ΔG vs. zAzB shows for over 200 ion pairs the expected linear correlation for a large variety of ions. Inorganic as well as organic ions display at moderate ionic strength I similar salt bridge association ΔG values around 5 to 6 kJ/mol for a 1:1 combination of anion and cation, almost independent of the nature (size, polarizability etc) of the ions. The ΔG values are additive and approximately a linear function of the charges, the interaction of e.g. a doubly charged phosphate anion with a single charged ammonium cation accounts for about 2x5 = 10 kJ/mol. The ΔG values depend on the ionic strength I of the solution, as described by the Debye–Hückel equation, at zero ionic strength one observes ΔG = 8 kJ/mol. The stabilities of the alkali-ion pairs as function of the anion charge z by can be described by a more detailed equation.

Salt bridges found in proteins

The salt bridge most often arises from the anionic carboxylate (RCOO−) of either aspartic acid or glutamic acid and the cationic ammonium (RNH3+) from lysine or the guanidinium (RNHC(NH2)2+) of arginine. Although these are the most common, other residues with ionizable side chains such as histidine, tyrosine, and serine can also participate, depending on outside factors perturbing their pKa's. The distance between the residues participating in the salt bridge is also cited as being important. The N-O distance required is less than 4 Å (400 pm). Amino acids greater than this distance apart do not qualify as forming a salt bridge. Due to the numerous ionizable side chains of amino acids found throughout a protein, the pH at which a protein is placed is crucial to its stability.

Salt bridges found in protein–ligand complexes Salt bridges also can form between a protein and small molecule ligands. Over 1100 unique protein-ligand complexes from the Protein Databank were found to form salt bridges with their protein targets, indicating that salt bridges are frequent in drug-protein interaction. These contain structures from different enzyme classes, including hydrolase, transferases, kinases, reductase, oxidoreductase, lyases, and G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs).

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