Thermal unfolding of Escherichia coli trigger factor studied by ultra-sensitive differential scanning calorimetry

Structural and molecular comparison of bacterial and eukaryotic trigger factors

A considerably small fraction of approximately 60–100 proteins of all chloroplast proteins are encoded by the plastid genome. Many of these proteins are major subunits of complexes with central functions within plastids. In comparison with other subcellular compartments and bacteria, many steps of chloroplast protein biogenesis are not well understood. We report here on the first study of chloroplast-localised trigger factor. In bacteria, this molecular chaperone is known to associate with translating ribosomes to facilitate the folding of newly synthesized proteins. Chloroplast trigger factors of the unicellular green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and the vascular land plant Arabidopsis thaliana were characterized by biophysical and structural methods and compared to the Escherichia coli isoform. We show that chloroplast trigger factor is mainly monomeric and displays only moderate stability against thermal unfolding even under mild heat-stress conditions. The global shape and conformation of these proteins were determined in solution by small-angle X-ray scattering and subsequent ab initio modelling. As observed for bacteria, plastidic trigger factors have a dragon-like structure, albeit with slightly altered domain arrangement and flexibility. This structural conservation despite low amino acid sequence homology illustrates a remarkable evolutionary robustness of chaperone conformations across various kingdoms of life.

SAXS data based global shape analysis of trigger factor (TF) proteins from E. coli, V. cholerae, and P. frigidicola: resolving the debate on the nature of monomeric and dimeric forms

Dimerization of bacterial chaperone trigger factor (TF) is an inherent protein concentration based property which available biophysical characterization and crystal structures have kept debatable. We acquired small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) intensity data from different TF homologues from Escherichia coli (ECTF), Vibrio cholerae (VCTF), and Psychrobacter frigidicola (PFTF) while varying each protein concentration. We found that ECTF and VCTF adopt a compact dimeric shape at higher concentrations which did not resemble the "back-to-back" conformation reported earlier for ECTF from crystallography (PDB ID: 1W26 ). In contrast, PFTF remained monomeric throughout the concentration range 2-90 μM displaying a multimodal open extended conformation. OLIGOMER analysis showed that both the ECTF and VCTF remained completely monomeric at lower concentrations (2-11 μM), while, at higher concentrations (60-90 μM), they adopted a dimeric form. Interestingly, the equilibrium existed in the medium concentration range (>11 and <60 μM), which correlates with the physiological concentration (40-50 μM) of TF in cell cytoplasm. Additionally, circular dichroism data revealed that solution structures of ECTF and VCTF contain predominantly α-helical content, while PFTF contains 310-helical content.

Improved stability and half-life of fluorinated phosphotriesterase using Rosetta

Recently we demonstrated that incorporating p-fluorophenylalanine (pFF) into phosphotriesterase dramatically improved folding, thereby leading to enhanced stability and function at elevated temperatures. To further improve the stability of the fluorinated enzyme, Rosetta was used to identify multiple potential stabilizing mutations. One such variant, pFF-F104A, exhibited enhanced activity at elevated temperature and maintained activity over many days in solution at room temperature.