Interatomic distances likely facilitate the restriction of protein dynamics to a limited number of modes essential for function, therefore changes in the protein packing under compression were also investigated.
The results showed increase in number of interatomic distances and packing density under high pressure. These observations, in the light of calculated compressibility of RNase molecule, proved that wt enzyme is more compressible than its modified variant. This results bring us to the conclusion, reported in previous studies [67], that less compressible variant has lower stability.
However, it is worth to mention that packing density alone should not be used to explain the differences in the compressibility among globular proteins