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Department of Life Science, Graduate School of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Midori-ku, Yokohama 226-8501, Japan
Reprint requests to: Takashi Kumasaka, Tokyo Institute of Technology, 4259 Nagatsuta-cho, Midori-ku, Yokohama 226-8501, Japan; e-mail: tkumasak{at}bio.titech.ac.jp; fax: +81-45-924-5707.
(RECEIVED October 7, 2004; FINAL REVISION October 7, 2004; ACCEPTED October 8, 2004)
| Abstract |
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B transcription factor by stress-response regulators. RsbP, a positive regulator, is a phosphatase containing a PAS (Per-ARNT-Sim) domain and requires catalytic function of a putative
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hydrolase, RsbQ, to be activated. These two proteins have been found to interact with each other. We determined the crystal structures of RsbQ in native and inhibitor-bound forms to investigate why RsbP requires RsbQ. These structures confirm that RsbQ belongs to the
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hydrolase superfamily. Since the catalytic triad is buried inside the molecule due to the closed conformation, the active site is constructed as a hydrophobic cavity that is nearly isolated from the solvent. This suggests that RsbQ has specificity for a hydrophobic small compound rather than a macromolecule such as RsbP. Moreover, structural comparison with other
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hydrolases demonstrates that a unique loop region of RsbQ is a likely candidate for the interaction site with RsbP, and the interaction might be responsible for product release by operating the hydrophobic gate equipped between the cavity and the solvent. Our results support the possibility that RsbQ provides a cofactor molecule for the mature functionality of RsbP.
Keywords:
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hydrolase superfamily; energy stress; stress response;
factor; PAS domain; cavity; phenylmethanesulfonyl fluoride (PMSF); catalytic triad
Abbreviations: PAS domain, Per-ARNT-Sim domain PMSF, phenyl-methanesulfonyl fluoride FMN, flavin mononucleotide FAD, flavin adenine dinucleotide
Article published online ahead of print. Article and publication date are at http://www.proteinscience.org/cgi/doi/10.1110/ps.041170005.
| Introduction |
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B transcription factor. Growth limitation by carbon, phosphate, or oxygen starvation causes energy stress (Price 2001) (or nutritional stress [Zhang and Haldenwang 2003]), resulting in release of
B from RsbW by the partner-switching mechanism as shown in Figure 1
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hydrolase superfamily with a putative catalytic triad composed of Ser96, His247, and Asp219. Yeast two-hybrid analysis revealed that RsbQ interacts with RsbP. Although the catalytic function of RsbQ as a putative hydrolase has yet to be elucidated, mutating either Ser96 or His247 abolishes the energy stress response in vivo. Brody et al. (2001) proposed the following model: RsbP is expressed as an inactive form and converted to the active form by RsbQ that modifies either RsbP or its potential cofactor. Here, we determined the native and inhibitor-bound crystal structures of RsbQ, and we discuss the molecular mechanism of RsbQ functioning as a potential modifier for RsbP. | Results |
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hydrolases homologous with RsbQ have been reported to form homo-oligomers such as a trimer (Hecht et al. 1994) or octamer (Nandhagopal et al. 2001), the estimated mass is consistent with a monomers calculated mass of 30.2 kDa.
We solved two crystal structures of RsbQ: the native structure solved up to 2.5 Å resolution, and the one reacted with phenylmethanesulfonyl fluoride (PMSF), a widely used serine protease inhibitor, solved up to 2.6 Å resolution. As a result of the reaction, a PMS group covalently attaches itself to the O
atom of a serine side chain (Fig. 2A
). The structures were solved by a molecular replacement method employing an ensemble model (see Materials and Methods). An asymmetric unit contains two RsbQ molecules, referred to as chain A and chain B. Crystallographic statistics are shown in Table 1
. The catalytic nucleophile, Ser96, is positioned in a generously allowed region in the Ramachandran plot in both the native and the PMS-bound structures. This is common among the
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hydrolases and is due to the formation of a sharp turn, called the "nucleophile elbow," that pushes the nucleophile outward away from the hydrolase domain (Nardini and Dijkstra 1999; see below). The temperature factors are quite high, especially for the chain B atoms. The average temperature factors calculated for the main chain atoms of the native structure are 40 Å2 for chain A and 60 Å2 for chain B. This is probably due to a relatively high solvent content of the crystal (65%) and poor crystal packing. The buried surface area contributing to intermolecular contacts in the crystal is 2392 Å2 for chain A, whereas it is 1433 Å2 for chain B, which occupies only 13% of the total molecular surface of the RsbQ molecule.
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hydrolase domain and a cap domain. The secondary structure elements contributing to the conserved "canonical"
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hydrolase fold (Heikinheimo et al. 1999; Nardini and Dijkstra 1999) are colored in cyan and magenta for
helices and
strands, respectively. The cap domain is drawn using two colors: yellow for a loop region containing the short antiparallel
sheet and red for the region consisting of four
helices. The catalytic triad residues, Ser96, Asp219, and His247, are positioned in the hydrolase domain and are covered by the cap domain, limiting the access to the active site from the solvent. Electron density corresponding to a loop region (Fig. 2B
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hydrolase superfamily, we chose 11 proteins that have high sequence identities with RsbQ from a BLAST (Altschul et al. 1997) search result against the sequence data set deposited in the Protein Data Bank (Berman et al. 2000) (see Materials and Methods for the 11 PDB IDs). Sequence identities between RsbQ and each of the 11 proteins are between 13% and 24%. Multiple structural alignment trials were performed on an alignment server, MASS (Dror et al. 2003; Shatsky et al. 2004). These 11 structures and the structure of RsbQ are well superposed on one another for the "canonical" hydrolase domain, whereas the structures corresponding to the cap domain and an
helix (shown in green in Fig. 2B
atoms from each structure. Among them, four cofactor-free haloperoxidases (1BRO: Hecht et al. 1994; 1A88, 1A8S, and 1A8Q: Hofmann et al. 1998) are superposable especially well with RsbQ. Root-mean-square deviation of these five structures is 1.2 Å for 219 C
atoms, including the
helices in the cap domain and the noncanonical
helix (Fig. 2F
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hydrolase structures.
The catalytic triad
Figure 3A
shows the active site of the native RsbQ molecule. The catalytic triad consists of Ser96, His247, and Asp219. Brody et al. (2001) did not make the conclusion that Asp219 is one of the triad residues from their sequence alignment results, because the nearby residue is also an aspartic acid residue, Asp218. Our structure now clearly shows that the acidic residue is Asp219. The nucleophile, Ser96, forms two hydrogen bonds, one connecting the O
atom of itself with the side chain nitrogen atom N
of His247, and the other with the backbone amino nitrogen atom of Val97 (Fig. 3A
). This result is consistent with other
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hydrolase structures: the backbone nitrogen atom of the residue following the nucleophile contributes to the formation of an oxyanion hole that stabilizes the negatively charged nucleophile during the transition state (Nardini and Dijkstra 1999). The native RsbQ captures a propylene glycol molecule supplemented as cryoprotectant (see Materials and Methods). The O1 atom of the molecule is connected with the backbone nitrogen atom of Phe27 by a hydrogen bond. Figure 3B
shows the active site structure of the PMS-bound RsbQ. The PMS group is covalently bound to the nucleophile, thus completely inhibiting its activity. In this structure, two hydrogen bonds connect the backbone nitrogen atoms of either Val97 or Phe27 with an oxygen atom of the PMS group. These results suggest that the backbone nitrogen atom of Phe27 may function as a site for substrate binding. A major structural difference caused by the binding of the PMS group is seen in a large movement of Phe196 (Fig. 3C
). Steric repulsion with the PMS group pushes the residue outward, although the backbone
,
angles do not differ largely.
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| Discussion |
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hydrolase superfamily. For example, a screening experiment by Sanishvili et al. (2003) identified that an E. coli
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hydrolase, BioH (PDB ID 1M33
[PDB]
), has carboxyesterase and thioesterase activities, as well as low lipase and aminopeptidase activities in vitro. Another example is a Pseudomonas fluorescens esterase. Pelletier and Altenbuchner (1995) found that this esterase is highly homologous with the haloperoxidases shown in Figure 2FThe crystal structures of the native and PMS-bound RsbQ molecules strongly suggest that its potential substrate(s) is small and hydrophobic. Therefore, it is unlikely that RsbQ hydrolyzes the RsbP protein itself for its conversion to the active form. Rather, RsbQ may possibly provide a small molecule as the catalyzed product that is required for the function or folding of the active RsbP. As discussed by Brody et al. (2001), the RsbP PAS domain is a candidate that receives a product, or a cofactor, from RsbQ. Among PAS domains identified thus far, a subset of them bind a cofactor such as heme, FMN, or FAD (for review, see Gilles-Gonzalez and Gonzalez 2004). Although no cofactor has ever been identified for the RsbP PAS domain (Brody et al. 2001), our structural results greatly support the possibility that RsbP binds a cofactor for its activity.
To function as a hydrolase, RsbQ must take in at least two molecules: a substrate molecule and a water molecule used for hydrolysis. Our crystal structures, however, show that the active site of RsbQ is nearly isolated from the solvent, and the hydrophobic gate denies solvent molecules any easy access to the active site. Nevertheless, RsbQ caught a propylene glycol or a PMSF molecule during the experimental process. Thus, the gate is not always closed. Considering that the uptake of the propylene glycol must have happened during soaking of the crystal in the cryoprotectant solution at room temperature, the RsbQ molecules fluctuate between the open and closed forms even being packed in a crystal at room temperature. A high solvent content of the crystal may help preserve this mobility. All the same, the apparent structural differences from the haloperoxidases lead to the suggestion that RsbQ exhibits much higher specificity in substrate recognition than the haloperoxidases. Another speculation is that the gate may be equipped to hold the catalyzed product inside and release it only when RsbQ reaches its destination. Identification of a substrate of RsbQ in vivo will be instrumental to a proper understanding of the differences.
The yeast two-hybrid analysis revealed that RsbQ interacts with RsbP (Brody et al. 2001). Biological significance of the interaction is, however, unclear. Although there is no obvious interaction site on the structure of RsbQ, we propose the loop region of the cap domain (colored in yellow in Figs. 2B
, 3D
) as a possible interaction site. This region is unique among the
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hydrolases used for comparison (Fig. 2E
). Once RsbP binds it, Phe136 that forms the narrow intake is expected to move (Fig. 3D
, in blue). The nearby
helices of the cap domain that possess the gate-forming residues such as Phe196 will also be perturbed. Here, an interpretation of the function of the closed gate may be made. Once RsbQ captures a substrate molecule, the gate closes from its flexible state to hold the molecule. Then RsbP attaches itself to the interaction site on RsbQ to open the gate. This enables RsbP to receive the catalyzed product from RsbQ. In this way, RsbP prompts RsbQ to provide a catalyzed product for RsbP itself. Although this interpretation is attractive, it is currently a speculative explanation. There is also the not yet studied, interesting question of whether RsbQ and RsbP can make a stable complex, or whether their interaction is transient as a part of the stress-response regulation. Our results provide fundamental information for further investigation into the interaction of RsbQ with RsbP as well as the regulation mechanism of energy stress response in Bacillus subtilis.
| Materials and methods |
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-D-1-thiogalactopyranoside. The cells were then collected and lysed by sonication in buffer A (20 mM HEPES-NaOH [pH 8.2] and 0.5 M NaCl) supplemented with 0.1% Triton-X 100. After loading on a chitin bead column (New England BioLabs), the column was washed with buffer A, and the tag fused to the protein was removed by on-column cleavage reaction with the buffer A supplemented with 50 mM dithiothreitol at 25°C for 2 d. The product cleaved from the tag was then eluted from the column with buffer A, dialyzed against 20 mM Tris-HCl (pH 8.0), and further purified with the anion exchange column MonoQ (Amersham Biosciences) in 20 mM Tris-HCl (pH 8.0) and an NaCl gradient. Preparation for RsbQ sample inhibited by PMSF (Fig. 2A
Crystallization and data collection
Both native and PMSF-inhibited RsbQ crystals were grown by the hanging-drop vapor diffusion method at 25°C within 2 d; 1.2 M sodium malonate was used as the precipitant for both samples. For collection of X-ray diffraction data at 100K, the native crystal was soaked in the precipitant solution containing 25% propylene glycol for several minutes at room temperature. The PMSF-inhibited crystal was soaked in the precipitant solution containing 20% glycerol. The data sets for the native crystal and the PMSF-inhibited crystal were collected at the beam line BL38B1 at SPring-8 and then processed with CrystalClear (Rigaku/MSC). The statistics for each data set are listed in Table 1
.
Structure determination
Solving the crystal structure of RsbQ by the molecular replacement method was somewhat complicated, since none of the structures solved thus far shares a sufficiently high sequence identity with RsbQ. Finally, two RsbQ molecules were found in an asymmetric unit by means of the following procedure. We chose five structures as the molecular replacement search model candidates (PDB IDs 1M33
[PDB]
, 1A88, 1BRO, 1C4X, and 1IUN). The sequence identity between RsbQ and each of the candidate proteins is between 19% and 24%. The diffraction data set from the PMSF-inhibited crystal was used. First, a structure prediction trial was performed on the I-SITES server (Bystroff and Shao 2002). It generated a predicted structure of RsbQ based on the coordinates of 1BRO (Hecht et al. 1994). However, molecular replacement trials using this predicted model failed. Therefore, an ensemble model was prepared in the following way. Coordinates of the five candidate proteins were superposed on one another to construct a "pseudo-NMR" model (Chen et al. 2000). This model was then applied to the molecular replacement trials with MolRep (Vagin and Teplyakov 1997). The result gave a solution corresponding to one molecule that could be assumed correct. The second molecule was uncertain at this stage. Therefore, model building with Xtal-View (McRee 1999) and refinement with CNS (Brunger et al. 1998) were performed for the first molecule with the help of the predicted structure described above. The refined structure was used as a search model for the molecular replacement trials to find the second molecule, which was done with EPMR (Kissinger et al. 1999). The calculated Matthews coefficient and solvent content are 3.5 and 65%, respectively. The structure of the native crystal was solved based on the PMSF-inhibited structure. Although we found 12 propylene glycol molecules in the asymmetric unit, it is impossible to distinguish between the two propylene glycol isomers since they have quite similar chemical structures (Fig. 2A
), and the resolution is also far from high enough to differentiate an oxygen atom from a carbon atom in the electron density map. Therefore, all the propylene glycol molecules are assigned as (s)-1,2-propanediol. Both structures were refined with XtalView and CNS. The refinement statistics for both structures are shown in Table 1
. Molecular graphics were performed with Pymol (http://pymol.sourceforge.net), except for Figure 3
, EH, drawn with GRASP (Nicholls et al. 1991). The 11 PDB IDs whose structures were used for structural comparison in Figure 2E
are as follows: 1BRO
[PDB]
(bromoperoxidase; Hecht et al. 1994), 1A88, 1A8S, 1A8Q (chloroperoxidases; Hofmann et al. 1998), 1M33 (E. coli BioH; Sanishvili et al. 2003), 1C4X (Nandhagopal et al. 2001), 1EHY, 1Q0R, 1BN7, 1IUP, and 1J1I.
Data deposition
The atomic coordinates and structure factors have been deposited in the Protein Data Bank with PDB ID codes 1WOM and 1WPR for the native and PMS-bound structures, respectively.
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