Mechanistic insights into the deleterious role of nasu-hakola disease associated TREM2 variants

Abstract

Recently, critical roles of genetic variants in Triggering Receptor Expressed on Myeloid cells 2 (TREM2) for myeloid cells to Alzhimers disease have been aggressively highlighted. However, little studies focused to the deleterious role of Nasu-Hakola disease (NHD) associated TREM2 variants. In order to get insights into the contributions of these variants in neurodegeneration, we investigated the influences of three well-known NHD associated TREM2 mutations (Y38C, T66M and V126G) on the loss-of-function by using conventional molecular dynamics simulation. Compared to the wild type, the mutants produced substantial differences in the collective motions in the loop regions, which not only promotes structural remodelling in complementarity-determining region 2 (CDR2) loop but also in CDR1 loop, through changing the inter and intra-loop hydrogen bonding network. In addition, the structural studies from free energy landscape showed that Y38, T66 and V126 are crucial for maintaining structural features of CDR1 and CDR2 loops, while their mutation at this position produced steric clash and thus contributes to the structural impact and loss of ligand binding. These results revealed that the presence of the mutations in TREM2 ectodomain induced flexibility and promotes structural alterations. Dynamical scenarios, which are provided by the present study, may be critical to our understanding of the role of the three TREM2 mutations in neurodegenerative diseases.