|
|
||||||||
Center for Eukaryotic Structural Genomics, Department of Biochemistry, University of WisconsinMadison, Madison, Wisconsin 53706-1544, USA
Reprint requests to: John L. Markley, Department of Biochemistry, University of WisconsinMadison, 433 Babcock Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA; e-mail: markley{at}nmrfam.wisc.edu; fax: (608) 262-3179.
(RECEIVED May 8, 2005; FINAL REVISION May 8, 2005; ACCEPTED May 11, 2005)
| Abstract |
|---|
|
|
|---|
Keywords: Urm1; NMR spectroscopy; structural genomics; ubiquitin fold
Article and publication are at http://www.proteinscience.org/cgi/doi/10.1110/ps.051577605.
| Introduction |
|---|
|
|
|---|
The Center for Eukaryotic Structural Genomics (CESG) chose Mus musculus AAH26994
[GenBank]
1 as a target on the basis of its low-sequence identity with proteins of known structure in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). The sequence of this protein suggested that it is a member of the recently described ubiquitin-related modifier protein (Urm1) family (Furukawa et al. 2000). Furukawa and coworkers characterized Urm1, along with its unique E1-like activating protein (Uba4) as the fifth conjugation system in yeast, along with ubiquitin, Smt3, Rub1, and Apg12. They also noted the sequence resemblance of these proteins to proteins from prokaryotes and higher organisms involved in sulfur transfer. Specifically, Urm1 showed an ~40% sequence identity to Escherichia coli modifier-like proteins from the molybdopeterin (MoaD) and thiamin (ThiS) biosynthetic pathways, and Uba4 showed sequence similarity to the corresponding activating enzymes (MoeB and ThiF). Urm1 was found to form a thioester with Uba4 (Furukawa et al. 2000); however, its natural E2, E3, and target substrate are unknown. As with ubiquitin and other ubiquitin-related modifiers, Urm1 possesses a GlyGly motif at the C terminus. Urm1 is found in many eukaryotes, including human (Fig. 1
). An Inter-ProScan search of the AAH26994
[GenBank]
1 sequence showed that the protein shares 14%22% sequence identity with the MoaD class of proteins, but only 6%14% sequence identity with other ubiquitin-like proteins.
|
-grasp superfamily fold similar to those of MoaD, ThiS, and ubiquitin. Of the structures in the PDB, AAH26994
[GenBank]
1 most closely resembles those of two prokaryotic MoaD proteins. | Results and Discussion |
|---|
|
|
|---|
|
-strands, two
-helices, and one 310-helix. Analysis of the 15N-edited and 13C-edited NOESY spectra revealed that the five
-strands form an anti-parallel
-sheet. The program TALOS (Cornilescu et al. 1999), which matches chemical shift and primary sequence with a database to predict
and
angles, also corroborated these secondary structural elements within AAH26994
[GenBank]
1.
|
-helices (residues 3848 and 7679), one 310-helix (residues 1518), and five
-strands (Fig. 4B
-sheet is characteristic of the compact ubiquitin fold. The hydrophobic core, which stabilizes the tertiary structure of AAH26994
[GenBank]
1, is formed mainly by the concave surface imposed by the hydrophobic residues of
-sheets 1, 2, 3, and 5. Hydrophobic residues located in helix 1 and the 310-helix also support formation of the hydrophobic core, but to a lesser extent. The aromatic rings of Tyr36 and Tyr86, which are partially exposed, cause upfield ring-current shifts of proton resonances in residues Leu29, Val69, and Glu81; this is a phenomenon observed in ubiquitin type folds.
|
|
The minimum energy structure of AAH26994
[GenBank]
1 was submitted to the fold recognition programs DALI (Holm and Sander 1995) and VAST (Gibrat and Madej 1996). Both programs identified the fold as ubiquitin type. The structure of AAH26994
[GenBank]
1 was closer to those of three bacterial MoaD proteins (subunits of molybdopterin synthase) than to that of any eukaryotic ubiquitin. The C
RMSD between AAH26994
[GenBank]
1 and each structural homolog, 1VJK (from Pyrococcus furiosus), 1FMA (from E. coli), and 1V8C (from Thermus thermophilus HB8), was calculated to be 1.9 Å, 2.0 Å, and 1.5 Å, respectively, with corresponding Z-scores of 6.3, 6.6, and 6.5. The sequence identities between AAH26994
[GenBank]
1 and those in the 1VJK, 1FMA, and 1V8C structures are 26%, 23%, and 14%, respectively (Fig. 5
). For comparison, AAH26994
[GenBank]
1 and human ubiquitin have a 15% sequence identity over 59 residues and a C
RMSD of 3.5 Å (Z-score of 4.2) for the corresponding structures.
|
Furukawa et al. (2000) speculated that the Urm1 conjugation system "may provide a missing link between ATP-dependent cofactor sulfuration and ATPdependent protein conjugation." The striking structural similarity between the structure of the ubiquitin-like protein Urm1 reported here and the structures of bacterial MoaD proteins (Fig. 5
) greatly strengthens this hypothesis. All three closely similar structures are from members of a class of proteins called molybdopterin converting factor/molybdopterin synthase. This protein acts as a sulfur donor in molybdenum cofactor (Moco) biosynthesis (Rudolph et al. 2001, 2003), a component of a biosynthetic pathway present in eubacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes, including humans. These structural results lend considerable support to the hypothesis (Furukawa et al. 2000) that the ubiquitin and ubiquitin-like conjugation systems found in eukaryotes evolved from primitive sulfur transfer systems in more primitive organisms.
| Materials and methods |
|---|
|
|
|---|
Cloning, expression, and protein purification
The mouse ORF clone of AAH26994
[GenBank]
was obtained from the IMAGE consortiums Mammalian Gene Collection (Strausberg et al. 1999). The ORF was reamplified and sub-cloned according to the protocols described in Thao et al. (2005). The expression vector used was our custom-made, pQE80-based (Qiagen) expression vector pVP16-GW. This Gateway (Invitrogen)-derived vector creates a fusion of the maltose- binding protein, 8XHIS tag, and tobacco etch virus (TEV) protease cleavage site to the N terminus of the mouse ORF.
Escherichia coli B834 (Novagen) was used as the expression host for isotopic labeling. This strain likely has a mutation in metE, and thus requires either methionine or vitamin B12 for growth. The cells were made competent by the Z-Competent (Geno Technology) method and then transformed with pLacI RARE (Novagen). The pLacI RARE transformants were also made competent by the same method.
Expression of double-labeled AAH26994 [GenBank] was carried out in 2 L of chemically defined auto-induction medium. The autoinduction medium was a modification of that originally developed by F. William Studier at Brookhaven National Laboratory (Studier 2005). The auto-induction growth components were modified to include isotopically labeled compounds, [U-15N]- labeled NH4Cl, [U-13C]-glucose, and [U-13C]-glycerol as the nitrogen and carbon sources, which allowed for [U-13C;U-15N] labeling of target protein. The exact details of the procedure, as well as the modified medium components for 13C;15N labeling using autoinduction have been described elsewhere (Tyler et al. 2005). Following this method, 18.7 g of wet cell mass were produced from 2 L of growth medium.
The cell mass was suspended in 75 mL of 50 mM NaH2PO4 (pH 7.5), containing 0.5MNaCl, 20% (w/v) ethylene glycol and 35 mM imidazole (Jeon et al. 2005). The cells were lysed by sonication. The sonicated cells were clarified by centrifugation. The recombinant fusion protein was purified by Ni2+-IMAC chromatography in a linear 0500-mM imidazole gradient. The purified fusion protein was desalted into 20 mM NaH2PO4 (pH 7.5), containing 100 mM NaCl, and reacted with tobacco etch virus (TEV) protease overnight at 25°C. The proteolyzed target was subjected to subtractive Ni2+-IMAC chromatography, and the pure target was desalted into 5 mM HEPES (pH 7.0), containing 50 mM NaCl, and concentrated. For final NMR experiments, the protein was exchanged with 10 mM Bis-Tris buffer containing 50 mM NaCl (pH 6.5).
NMR measurements
NMR samples consisted of 1.0 mM [U-13C;U-15N]-AAH26994 in 5 mM Bis-Tris (pH 6.5). NMR spectra were collected at 25°C on a Varian UNITYINOVA 800 MHz NMR spectrometer equipped with a 5-mm z-shielded gradient 1H-13C-15N triple-resonance cold probe. For the backbone resonance assignments, three-dimensional (3D) HNCO, HNCACB, CBCA(CO)NH, NOESY-(15N,1H)-HSQC spectra were recorded as described in Palmer et al. (1992), and the side-chain resonance assignments, 3D HBHA(CO)NH, H(CCO)NH, C(CO)NH, and H(C)CH TOCSY data sets were recorded. NOE distance constraints were obtained from 3D-NOESY(15N,1H)-HSQC, and 3D NOESY-(13C,1H)-HSQC spectra with 100-msec mixing times. The software package NMRPipe (Delaglio et al. 1995) was used to process all NMR time-domain data, and NMRView (Johnson and Blevins 1994) was used to analyze spectra.
Chemical shift-derived and hydrogen-bond restraints
Assigned chemical shifts were determined for 97% of the nuclei. The 13C
, 13C
, 13C', 1H
, and 15Nchemical shifts of the assigned residues served as input for the TALOS program (Cornilescu et al. 1999). TALOS derives information on the
and
backbone dihedral angles from a comparison of secondary chemical-shift patterns of amino acid triplets against a database of secondary chemical shifts corresponding to known conformations. A conservative approach was chosen requiring that all 10 best matches agree for a prediction to be accepted. The TALOS predictions were converted into dihedral angle restraints as the average
and
angles ± 2 x the standard deviation or a minimum of ± 20°. For better convergence, a number of hydrogen-bond restraints were introduced for the backbone amide protons on the basis of amide 1H-2H exchange results, 13C
/13C
secondary shifts, and NOE data. Hydrogen bonds were enforced by using the following restraints: 1.82.3 Å for d(N-H, O); 2.73.3 Å for d(N, O). The hydrogen bonds between N-Hi and O-Cj, in the
-sheet structures were included as restraints only if the
-sheet interstrand dNN(i, j) and d
N(i, j) NOE cross-peaks were observed. Hydrogen-bond constraints for
-helices were included when NOEs corresponding to the secondary structure d
N(i, i+3) for
-helices were observed.
Structure calculations
All calculations were performed with CNS (Brünger et al. 1998) using the ARIA setup and protocols (Nilges and ODonoghue 1998; Linge and Nilges 1999). The TALOS-derived dihedral angles were restrained with a harmonic potential using a force constant of 200 kcal mol1 rad2. Covalent interactions were calculated with a modified version of the PARALLHDG 5.3 parameter file (Linge and Nilges 1999) based on the CSDX parameter set. In addition to the bonded energy terms typically used in NMR structure calculations (bond, angle, and improper energy terms), the dihedral angle energy term describing torsions around rotatable bonds ("dihe" flag in CNS) was turned on. This energy term greatly improved the quality of side-chain
1 and
2 rotamers as assessed by PROCHECK (Laskowski et al. 1996). Nonbonded interactions were calculated with the repel function by using the PROLSQ parameters as implemented in the PARALLHDG parameter file. The OPLS nonbonded parameters (Jorgensen 1988) were used for the final water refinement, including full van der Waals and electrostatic energy terms. The nonbonded pair list was generated with a 9.5 Å cutoff, and the nonbonded interaction was calculated with an 8.5 Å cutoff using a shifting function.
A simulated annealing protocol in Cartesian space was used, starting from an extended conformation. Force constants were scaled throughout the protocol following the default ARIA/ CNS setup. The atomic masses were set uniformly to 100 amu, and the friction coefficient fbeta for the coupling to the external temperature bath was set to 20 psec1. The simulated annealing protocol, which is similar to the one described in Linge and Nilges (1999), consisted of four stages: (1) high-temperature SA stage (10,000 steps; 2000 K), (2) a first cooling phase from 2000 to 1000 K in 10,000 steps, (3) a second cooling phase from 1000 K to 50 K in 5000 steps, followed by (4) 200 steps of energy minimization. The time step for the integration was set to 0.003 psec.
The structures were subjected to a final refinement protocol in explicit water by solvating them with a 8- Å layer of TIP3P waters (Duffy et al. 1992). The water refinement consisted of a heating period (50 MD steps at 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500 K; time step 0.005 fsec) with harmonic position restraints on the C
atoms (kharm=10 kcal mol1 Å 2), followed by 2500 MD steps at 500 K without any position restraints, and a final cooling stage from 500 to 100 K in 100 K steps (1000 MD steps per temperature step). The resulting structures were energy minimized with 100 steps of Powell steepest descent minimization.
PROCHECK-NMR (Laskowski et al. 1996) was used to assess the quality of the final ensemble of conformers. Structures were visualized with the programs MOLMOL (Koradi et al. 1996) or RASMOL (Sayle and Milner-White 1995). The chemical shifts of AAH26994. The atomic coordinates of the ensemble of 20 structures that represent the solution structure of AAH26994 [GenBank] 1 have been deposited in the PDB, together with the complete list of restraints used for structure calculation under accession number 1XO3 [PDB] . The structure was determined under the NIH, NIGMS Protein Structure Initiative.
| Acknowledgments |
|---|
| References |
|---|
|
|
|---|
Cornilescu, G., Delaglio, F., and Bax, A. 1999. Protein backbone angle restraints from searching a database for chemical shift and sequence homology. J. Biomol. NMR 13: 289302.[CrossRef][Medline]
Delaglio, F., Grzesiek, S., Vuister, G.W., Zhu, G., Pfeifer, J., and Bax, A. 1995. NMRPipe: A multidimensional spectral processing system based on UNIX pipes. J. Biomol. NMR 6: 277293.[Medline]
Duffy, E.M., Severance, D.L., and Jorgensen, W.L. 1992. Solvent effects on the barrier to isomerization for a tertiary amide from Ab initio and Monte-Carlo calculations. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 114: 75357542.[CrossRef]
Eghbalnia, H., Bahrami, A., Wang, L., Assadi, A., and Markley, J.L. 2005. PISTACHIO: An approach for probabilistic sequence-specific assignments of signals from protein NMR spectra. J. Biomol. NMR (in press).
Furukawa, K., Mizushima, N., Noda, T., and Ohsumi, Y. 2000. A protein conjugation system in yeast with homology to biosynthetic enzyme reaction of prokaryotes. J. Biol. Chem. 275: 74627465.
Gibrat, J.F. and Madej, T.B.S. 1996. Surprising similarities in structure comparison. Curr. Opin. Struct. Biol. 6: 377385.[CrossRef][Medline]
Goehring, A.S., Rivers, D.M., and Sprague Jr., G.F. 2003a. Urmylation: A ubiquitin-like pathway that functions during invasive growth and budding in yeast. Mol. Biol. Cell 14: 43294341.
. 2003b. Attachment of the ubiquitin-related protein Urm1p to the antioxidant protein Ahp1p. Eukaryotic Cell 2: 930936.
Hershko, A., Ciechanover, J.A., and Varshavsky, A. 2000. The ubiquitin system. Nat. Med. 6: 10731081.[CrossRef][Medline]
Hochstrasser, M. 2000. Evolution and function of ubiquitin-like protein-conjugation systems. Nat. Cell Biol. 2: E153E157.[CrossRef][Medline]
Holm, L. and Sander, C. 1995. Dali: A network tool for protein structure comparison. Trends. Biochem. Sci. 20: 478480.[CrossRef][Medline]
Jeon, W.B., Aceti, D.J., Bingman, C.A., Vojtik, F.C., Olson, A.C., Ellefson, J.M., McCombs, J.E., Sreenath, H., Blommel, P.G., Seder, K.D., et al. 2005. High-throughput purification and quality assurance of Arabidopsis thaliana proteins for eukaryotic structural genomics. J. Struct. Funct. Genomics (in press).
Johnson, B.A. and Blevins, R.A. 1994. NMRViewA computer-program for the visualization and analysis of NMR data. J. Biomol. NMR 4: 603614.[CrossRef]
Jorgensen, W.L. 1988. OPLS force fields. Encycl. Computat. Chem. 3: 17541763.
Koradi, R., Billeter, M., and Wüthrich, K. 1996. MOLMOL: A program for display and analysis of macromolecular structures. J. Mol. Graph. 14: 5155.[CrossRef][Medline]
Laskowski, R.A., Rullmann, J.A., MacArthur, M.W., Kaptein, R., and Thornton, J.M. 1996. AQUA and PROCHECK-NMR: Programs for checking the quality of protein structures solved by NMR. J. Biomol. NMR 8: 477486.[Medline]
Linge, J.P. and Nilges, M. 1999. Influence of non-bonded parameters on the quality of NMR structures: A new force field for NMR structure calculation. J. Biomol. NMR 13: 5159.[CrossRef][Medline]
Nilges, M. and ODonoghue, S.I. 1998. Ambiguous NOEs and automated NOE assignment. Prog. NMR Spect. 32: 107139.
Palmer III, A.G., Fairbrother, W.J., Cavanagh, J., Wright, P.E., and Rance, M. 1992. Improved resolution in three-dimensional constant-time triple resonance NMR spectroscopy of proteins. J. Biomol. NMR 2: 103108.[Medline]
Rudolph, M.J., Wuebbens, M.M., Rajagopalan, K.V., and Schindelin, H. 2001. Crystal structure of molybdopterin synthase and its evolutionary relationship to ubiquitin activation. Nat. Struct. Biol. 8: 4246.[CrossRef][Medline]
Rudolph, M.J., Wuebbens, M.M., Turque, O., Rajagopalan, K.V., and Schindelin, H. 2003. Structural studies of molybdopterin synthase provide insights into its catalytic mechanism. J. Biol. Chem. 278: 1451414522
Sayle, R.A. and Milner-White, E.J. 1995. RASMOL: Biomolecular graphics for all. Trends Biochem. Sci. 20: 374.[CrossRef][Medline]
Strausberg, R.L., Feingold, E.A., Klausner, R.D., and Collins, F.S. 1999. The mammalian gene collection. Science 286: 455457.
Studier, F.W. 2005. Protein production by auto-induction in high-density shaking cultures. Protein Expr. Purif. 41: 207234.[CrossRef][Medline]
Thao, S., Zhao, Q., Kimball, T., Steffen, E., Blommel, P.G., Riters, M., Newman, C.S., Fox, B.G., and Wrobel, R.L. 2005. Results from high-throughput DNA cloning of Arabidopsis thaliana target genes using site-specific recombination. J. Struct. Funct. Genomics 5: 267 276.
Tyler, R.C., Sreenath, H., Aceti, D.J., Bingman, C.A., Singh, S., Markley, J.L., and Fox, B.G. 2005. Auto-induction medium for the production of [U-15N]- and [U-13C, U-15N]-labeled proteins for NMR screening and structure determination. Protein Expr. Purif. 40: 268278.[Medline]
Wang, C., Xi, J., Begley, T.P., and Nicholson, L.K. 2001. Solution structure of ThiS and implications for the evolutionary roots of ubiquitin. Nat. Struct. Biol. 8: 4751.[CrossRef][Medline]
Wishart, D.S. and Sykes, B.D. 1994. The 13C chemical shift index: A simple method for the identification of protein secondary structure using 13C chemical shifts. J. Biomol. NMR 4: 171180.[Medline]
Zolnai, Z., Lee, P.T., Li, J., Chapman, M.R., Newman, C.S., Phillips Jr., G.N., Rayment, I., Ulrich, E.L., Volkman, B.F., and Markley, J.L. 2003. Project management system for structural and functional proteomics: Sesame. J. Struct. Funct. Genomics 4: 1123.[CrossRef][Medline]
![]()
CiteULike
Connotea
Del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Technorati What's this?
This article has been cited by other articles:
![]() |
B. P. Downes, S. A. Saracco, S. S. Lee, D. N. Crowell, and R. D. Vierstra MUBs, a Family of Ubiquitin-fold Proteins That Are Plasma Membrane-anchored by Prenylation J. Biol. Chem., September 15, 2006; 281(37): 27145 - 27157. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
||||
![]() |
J. Xu, J. Zhang, L. Wang, J. Zhou, H. Huang, J. Wu, Y. Zhong, and Y. Shi Solution structure of Urm1 and its implications for the origin of protein modifiers PNAS, August 1, 2006; 103(31): 11625 - 11630. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |