Peptides with More than One 106-amino Acid Sequence Motif Are Needed to Mimic the Structural Stability of Spectrin*

The primary sequence of human erythrocyte spectrin contains repetitive homologous sequence motifs of approximately 106 amino acids with 22 such motifs in the α-subunit and 17 in the β-subunit. These homologous sequence motifs have been proposed to form domains with a triple-helical bundle type structure (Speicher, D. W., and Marchesi, V. T. (1984) Nature 311, 177-180; Parry, D. A. D., Dixon, T. W., and Cohen, C. (1992) Biophys. J. 61, 858-867). In this study, we show that these sequence motifs, while they do form compact proteolytically resistant units, are not completely independent. Peptides composed of two or three such motifs in tandem are substantially more stable than peptides composed of a single motif, as measured by proteolysis or by fluorescence or circular dichroism studies of urea or thermal denaturation. Circular dichroism and infrared spectroscopy measurements also indicate that these larger, more stable peptides exhibit greater secondary structure. In these respects, the peptides with tandem sequence motifs are more similar to intact spectrin than the peptide with a single sequence motif. Thus, we conclude that peptides with more than one sequence motif model spectrin more adequately than the peptides with one sequence motif, and that these sequence motifs are not completely independent domains.