A new type of helix in protein structure.

Protein folding is a fundamental problem in structural bioinformatics and so numerous studies have been devoted to the subject. As the most common regular secondary conformation in proteins, helix has been an important ingredient of the protein folding problem. In particular, alanine based polypeptides are widely studied to identify the helix folding process in that the aianine amino acid is known to have one of the highest helix propensities. In principle, intrinsic helix propensities can be obtained from gas-phase measurements where solvent effect is absent. Hudgins et al. studied alanine-based peptides in vacuo using high-resolution ion mobility measurement technique. It was reported that introduction of a single Iysine at the C terminus resulted in the formation of very stable, monomeric polyalanine helices. We also have investigated helix formation in vacuo with different terminal charge conditions; we have found a new type of helix motif, To the best of our knowledge, this type of helix conformation has not been characterized before and we name it as I-helix.