Structural highlights
Evolutionary Conservation Check, as determined by ConSurfDB. You may read the explanation of the method and the full data available from ConSurf. Publication Abstract from PubMedIntermediate filaments (IFs) are essential cytoskeletal components in metazoan cells. They assemble from elementary dimers that are built around the central alpha-helical coiled-coil rod domain representing the IF 'signature'. The rod consists of two similarly-sized parts, coil 1 and coil 2, connected by a non-alpha-helical linker L12. Coil 2 is absolutely conserved in length across all IF types and was initially predicted to consist of a short coiled-coil segment 2A based on a heptad pattern of hydrophobic residues, another linker L2 and a coiled-coil segment 2B. Here we present the crystal structure of human vimentin fragment including residues 261-335 i.e. approximately the first half of coil 2. The N-terminal part of this fragment reveals a parallel alpha-helical bundle characterized by 3.5 consecutive hendecad repeats. It is immediately followed by a regular left-handed coiled coil. The distinct non-helical linker L2 is therefore not observed. Together with the previously determined crystal structure of the major part of segment 2B (Strelkov et al., 2002), we can now build a complete atomic model of the 21nm long vimentin coil 2 dimer being a relatively rigid rod. Atomic structure of vimentin coil 2.,Nicolet S, Herrmann H, Aebi U, Strelkov SV J Struct Biol. 2010 May;170(2):369-76. Epub 2010 Feb 20. PMID:20176112[1] From MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. References
| ||||||||||||||||||||
This page was last modified 17:05, 18 December 2014.