Orientational landscapes of peptides in membranes: prediction of (2)H NMR couplings in a dynamic context.

Unlike soluble proteins, membrane polypeptides face an anisotropic milieu. This imposes restraints on their orientation and provides a reference that makes structure prediction tractable by minimalistic thermodynamic models. Here we use this framework to build orientational distributions of monomeric membrane-bound peptides and to predict their expected solid-state (2)H NMR quadrupolar couplings when labeled at specific side chain positions. Using a complete rigid-body sampling of configurations relative to an implicit lipid membrane, peptide free energy landscapes are calculated. This allows us to obtain probability distributions of the peptide tilt, azimuthal rotation, and depth of membrane insertion. The orientational distributions are broad and originate from an interplay among the three relevant rigid-body degrees of freedom, which allows population of multiple states in shallow free energy minima. Remarkably, only when the orientational distributions are taken into account do we obtain a close correlation between predicted (2)H NMR splittings and values measured in experiments. Such a good correlation is not seen with splittings calculated from single configurations, being either the averaged or the lowest free energy state, showing there are distributions, rather than single structures, that best define the peptide-membrane systems. Moreover, we propose that these distributions contribute to the understanding of the rigid-body dynamics of the system.