1pxu: Difference between revisions

[[Image:1pxu.gif|left|200px]]<br /><applet load="1pxu" size="350" color="white" frame="true" align="right" spinBox="true"  

Agrin is a key organizer for postsynaptic differentiation at the neuromuscular junction (NMJ). This activity requires the binding of agrin to the synaptic basal lamina via its N-terminal (NtA) domain. It has been suggested that this binding is mediated by conserved amino acids in the gamma 1 chain of laminin. Here, we report the crystal structure of chicken NtA expressed in eukaryotic HEK293 cells. In contrast to the previously published structure [Stetefeld, J., Jenny, M., Schulthess, T., Landwehr, R., Schumacher, B., Frank, S., Ruegg, M.A., Engel, J., Kammerer, R.A., 2001. The laminin-binding domain of agrin is structurally related to N-TIMP-1. Nat. Struct. Biol., 8, 705-709.], which was derived from the NtA domain expressed in E. coli, the new data show that the N-terminal tail region (amino acid residues Asn1-Arg5) is highly structured. Moreover, the disulfide bridge between Cys2 and Cys74 was also present. In addition, we show that the binding of NtA requires the gamma 1 chain of laminin and is not greatly affected by the composition of beta chains. These results confirm a model of the NtA-laminin complex where conserved amino acids in the gamma 1 chain are prerequisite for the binding to agrin and they further emphasize that the source of protein can be critical in structure determination.

1PXU is a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_protein Single protein] structure of sequence from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallus_gallus Gallus gallus]. Full crystallographic information is available from [http://oca.weizmann.ac.il/oca-bin/ocashort?id=1PXU OCA].  

''Page seeded by [http://oca.weizmann.ac.il/oca OCA ] on Thu Feb 21 14:33:41 2008''