Flexible linkers in CaMKII control the balance between activating and inhibitory autophosphorylation
- University of California, Berkeley, United States
- San Diego State University, United States
- Panorama Institute of Molecular Medicine, United States
Abstract
The many variants of human Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII) differ in the lengths and sequences of disordered linkers connecting the kinase domains to the oligomeric hub of the holoenzyme. CaMKII activity depends on the balance between activating and inhibitory autophosphorylation (on Thr 286 and Thr 305/306, respectively, in the human a isoform). Variation in the linkers could alter transphosphorylation rates within a holoenzyme and the balance of autophosphorylation outcomes. We show, using mammalian-cell expression and a single-molecule assay, that the balance of autophosphorylation is flipped between CaMKII variants with longer and shorter linkers. For the principal isoforms in the brain, CaMKII-a, with a ~30 residue linker, readily acquires activating autophosphorylation, while CaMKII-b, with a ~200 residue linker, is biased towards inhibitory autophosphorylation. Our results show how the responsiveness of CaMKII holoenzymes to calcium signals can be tuned by varying the relative levels of isoforms with long and short linkers.
Data availability
All data generated or analyzed during this study are summarized in the manuscript, figures, appendix, and supplementary files. The in-house Matlab programs that are used for data analysis are provided as Source code file 1 and is open-access.
Article and author information
Author details
Moitrayee Bhattacharyya
Funding
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (K99 GM 126145)
- Moitrayee Bhattacharyya
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- John Kuriyan
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2020, Bhattacharyya 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
-
- 3,720
- views
-
- 534
- downloads
-
- 44
- 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)
Flexible linkers in CaMKII control the balance between activating and inhibitory autophosphorylation
eLife 9:e53670.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.53670
Further reading
-
- Biochemistry and Chemical Biology
- Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine
Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) have great potential to be used as alternatives to embryonic stem cells (hESCs) in regenerative medicine and disease modelling. In this study, we characterise the proteomes of multiple hiPSC and hESC lines derived from independent donors and find that while they express a near-identical set of proteins, they show consistent quantitative differences in the abundance of a subset of proteins. hiPSCs have increased total protein content, while maintaining a comparable cell cycle profile to hESCs, with increased abundance of cytoplasmic and mitochondrial proteins required to sustain high growth rates, including nutrient transporters and metabolic proteins. Prominent changes detected in proteins involved in mitochondrial metabolism correlated with enhanced mitochondrial potential, shown using high-resolution respirometry. hiPSCs also produced higher levels of secreted proteins, including growth factors and proteins involved in the inhibition of the immune system. The data indicate that reprogramming of fibroblasts to hiPSCs produces important differences in cytoplasmic and mitochondrial proteins compared to hESCs, with consequences affecting growth and metabolism. This study improves our understanding of the molecular differences between hiPSCs and hESCs, with implications for potential risks and benefits for their use in future disease modelling and therapeutic applications.
-
- Biochemistry and Chemical Biology
- Structural Biology and Molecular Biophysics
Dynamic conformational and structural changes in proteins and protein complexes play a central and ubiquitous role in the regulation of protein function, yet it is very challenging to study these changes, especially for large protein complexes, under physiological conditions. Here, we introduce a novel isobaric crosslinker, Qlinker, for studying conformational and structural changes in proteins and protein complexes using quantitative crosslinking mass spectrometry. Qlinkers are small and simple, amine-reactive molecules with an optimal extended distance of ~10 Å, which use MS2 reporter ions for relative quantification of Qlinker-modified peptides derived from different samples. We synthesized the 2-plex Q2linker and showed that the Q2linker can provide quantitative crosslinking data that pinpoints key conformational and structural changes in biosensors, binary and ternary complexes composed of the general transcription factors TBP, TFIIA, and TFIIB, and RNA polymerase II complexes.
