Structural principles of SNARE complex recognition by the AAA+ protein NSF

  1. K Ian White
  2. Minglei Zhao
  3. Ucheor B Choi
  4. Richard A Pfuetzner
  5. Axel T Brunger  Is a corresponding author
  1. Stanford University, United States
  2. University of Chicago, United States

Abstract

The recycling of SNARE proteins following complex formation and membrane fusion is an essential process in eukaryotic trafficking. A highly conserved AAA+ protein, NSF (N-ethylmaleimide sensitive factor) and an adaptor protein, SNAP (soluble NSF attachment protein), disassembles the SNARE complex. We report electron-cryomicroscopy structures of the complex of NSF, αSNAP, and the full-length soluble neuronal SNARE complex (composed of syntaxin-1A, synaptobrevin-2, SNAP-25A) in the presence of ATP under non-hydrolyzing conditions at ~3.9 Å resolution. These structures reveal electrostatic interactions by which two αSNAP molecules interface with a specific surface of the SNARE complex. This interaction positions the SNAREs such that the 15 N-terminal residues of SNAP-25A are loaded into the D1 ring pore of NSF via a spiral pattern of interactions between a conserved tyrosine NSF residue and SNAP-25A backbone atoms. This loading process likely precedes ATP hydrolysis. Subsequent ATP hydrolysis then drives complete disassembly.

Data availability

The coordinates and corresponding EM density maps have been deposited in the PDB and EMDB, respectively.

The following data sets were generated
    1. Axel T Brunger
    (2018) The 20S supercomplex engaging the SNAP-25 N-terminus (class 1)
    Publicly available at the EMBL-EBI Protein Data Bank (accession no: EMD-9100).
    1. Axel T Brunger
    (2018) The 20S supercomplex engaging the SNAP-25 N-terminus (class 2)
    Publicly available at the EMBL-EBI Protein Data Bank (accession no: EMD-9101).

Article and author information

Author details

  1. K Ian White

    Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, Stanford University, Stanford, United States
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  2. Minglei Zhao

    Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Chicago, Chicago, United States
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  3. Ucheor B Choi

    Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, Stanford University, Stanford, United States
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  4. Richard A Pfuetzner

    Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, Stanford University, Stanford, United States
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  5. Axel T Brunger

    Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, Stanford University, Stanford, United States
    For correspondence
    brunger@stanford.edu
    Competing interests
    Axel T Brunger, Reviewing editor, eLife.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-5121-2036

Funding

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

  • Axel T Brunger

National Institutes of Health

  • Axel T Brunger

Helen Hay Whitney Foundation

  • K Ian White

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Copyright

© 2018, White et al.

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

Metrics

  • 3,849
    views
  • 667
    downloads
  • 71
    citations

Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.

Download links

A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.

Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)

Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)

Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)

  1. K Ian White
  2. Minglei Zhao
  3. Ucheor B Choi
  4. Richard A Pfuetzner
  5. Axel T Brunger
(2018)
Structural principles of SNARE complex recognition by the AAA+ protein NSF
eLife 7:e38888.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.38888

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.38888

Further reading

    1. Neuroscience
    Nishal Pradeepbhai Shah, AJ Phillips ... EJ Chichilnisky
    Tools and Resources

    Neural implants have the potential to restore lost sensory function by electrically evoking the complex naturalistic activity patterns of neural populations. However, it can be difficult to predict and control evoked neural responses to simultaneous multi-electrode stimulation due to nonlinearity of the responses. We present a solution to this problem and demonstrate its utility in the context of a bidirectional retinal implant for restoring vision. A dynamically optimized stimulation approach encodes incoming visual stimuli into a rapid, greedily chosen, temporally dithered and spatially multiplexed sequence of simple stimulation patterns. Stimuli are selected to optimize the reconstruction of the visual stimulus from the evoked responses. Temporal dithering exploits the slow time scales of downstream neural processing, and spatial multiplexing exploits the independence of responses generated by distant electrodes. The approach was evaluated using an experimental laboratory prototype of a retinal implant: large-scale, high-resolution multi-electrode stimulation and recording of macaque and rat retinal ganglion cells ex vivo. The dynamically optimized stimulation approach substantially enhanced performance compared to existing approaches based on static mapping between visual stimulus intensity and current amplitude. The modular framework enabled parallel extensions to naturalistic viewing conditions, incorporation of perceptual similarity measures, and efficient implementation for an implantable device. A direct closed-loop test of the approach supported its potential use in vision restoration.

    1. Neuroscience
    Cuong Pham, Yuji Komaki ... Dongdong Li
    Research Article

    Brain water homeostasis not only provides a physical protection, but also determines the diffusion of chemical molecules key for information processing and metabolic stability. As a major type of glia in brain parenchyma, astrocytes are the dominant cell type expressing aquaporin water channel. How astrocyte aquaporin contributes to brain water homeostasis in basal physiology remains to be understood. We report that astrocyte aquaporin 4 (AQP4) mediates a tonic water efflux in basal conditions. Acute inhibition of astrocyte AQP4 leads to intracellular water accumulation as optically resolved by fluorescence-translated imaging in acute brain slices, and in vivo by fiber photometry in mobile mice. We then show that aquaporin-mediated constant water efflux maintains astrocyte volume and osmotic equilibrium, astrocyte and neuron Ca2+ signaling, and extracellular space remodeling during optogenetically induced cortical spreading depression. Using diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI), we observed that in vivo inhibition of AQP4 water efflux heterogeneously disturbs brain water homeostasis in a region-dependent manner. Our data suggest that astrocyte aquaporin, though bidirectional in nature, mediates a tonic water outflow to sustain cellular and environmental equilibrium in brain parenchyma.