STUDIES ON HYDROPHOBIC INTERACTIONS OF THREE KINDSOF METALLOTHIONEIN AGGREGATES
三种金属硫蛋白聚合体的疏水性相互作用研究

In this paper, the hydrophobic interaction between constituent units in dimers and trimers was studied by calculating the solvent-accessible surface areas. Three kinds of metallothioneins including MT-II from rat liver, MT-I and MT-II from rabbit were investigated. The total area of the binding interface for the dimers and trimers showed that all of them possess good steric complementarity. For three dimers, the hydrophobic interactions between two monomers were not very strong. But for three trimers, the hydrophobic interactions between the monomers and dimers were significant. Moreover, the hydrophobic effects for the MT-II trimer from rat liver and MT-II trimer from rabbit were clearly much stronger than that of the MT-I trimer from rabbit.