Molecular Machines for Protein Degradation

Matthias Bochtler, Michael Croll, Hans Brandstetter, Tim Clausen, and Robert Huber 

ATP-dependent proteases are complex proteolytic machines. They are present in eubacteria, archaebacteria, in eukaryotic organelles and, as the 20S or 26S proteasome, in the eukaryotic cytosol and nucleoplasm. The activators of all known ATP-dependent proteases are related. They all contain an AAA(+) ATPase domain as a module (Neuwald et al. 1999) and are thought to assemble into hexameric particles or, in the case of 26S proteasomes, are present in six variants in the 19S activators (Glickman et al. 1999). Like the ATPases, the proteolytic components of the ATP-dependent proteases form higher order complexes, but unlike for the ATPases, the symmetry of the protease assemblies varies, and the folds of the subunits need not be related. ClpP is a serine protease, FtsH a metalloprotease, and HslV and the proteasomes from archaebacteria and eubacteria are threomne proteases. 

Although extensive biochemical data on both the bacterial and eukaryotic ATP-dependent proteases are available, the characterization of these proteolytic machines at atomic resolution has proven difficult, because of both the large size of these complexes and their lability to proteolysis and dissociation. No structural data at all are currently available for Lon and the mitochondrial ATP-dependent proteases. In the case of the cytosolic, membrane-integrated bacterial protease FtsH, atomic resolution data are available only for the ATPase domain (Krzywda et al. 2002 Niwa et al. 2002). In contrast, the ATP-dependent activators of the ClpAP and ClpXP proteolytic machines have so far resisted crystallization. Atomic resolution data are available only for the proteolytic component ClpP (Wang et al. 1997), and separately for a ClpX monomer (Kim and Kim 2003) and a ClpA monomer (Guo et al. 2002b). 

The bacterial protease HslVU is unique in two respects at present, it is the only ATP-dependent protease to have atomic coordinates of the full complex determined secondly, and in contrast to all other bacterial ATP-dependent proteases, it contains a proteolytic core that is related to the 20S proteolytic core of archaebacterial and eukaryotic proteasomes. The following sections summarize our understanding of HslVU biochemistry, crystallography, and enzymology and end with some speculation on the implications of these results for other ATP-dependent proteases. 

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