Ribonuclease structure

Christian B. Anfinsen, Sanford Moore, and William H. Stein Chemistry Ribonuclease, structure and activity... 

D Alessio, G., and Riordan, J. F., eds. (1997) Ribonuclease Structure and Functions, Academic Press, San Diego, California... 

Ray, W.J., Jr. and C.B. Post. 1990. The oxyvanadium constellation in transition-state-analogue complexes of phosphoglucomutase and ribonuclease. Structural deductions from electron-transfer spectra. J. Biochem. 29 2779-2789. 

M. Irie inG. D Alessio, J.F. Riordan, eds.. Ribonucleases Structures and Functions, Academic Press, USA, 1997. 

Figure 4.11 Schematic diagram of the structure of the ribonuclease inhibitor. The molecule, which is built up by repetitive P-loop-a motifs, resembles a horseshoe with a 17-stranded parallel p sheet on the inside and 16 a helices on the outside. The P sheet is light red, a helices are blue, and loops that are part of the p-loop-(x motifs are orange. (Adapted from B. Kobe et al.. Nature 366 7S1-756,...

Leucine residues 2, 5, 7, 12, 20, and 24 of the motif are invariant in both type A and type B repeats of the ribonuclease inhibitor. An examination of more than 500 tandem repeats from 68 different proteins has shown that residues 20 and 24 can be other hydrophobic residues, whereas the remaining four leucine residues are present in all repeats. On the basis of the crystal structure of the ribonuclease inhibitor and the important structural role of these leucine residues, it has been possible to construct plausible structural models of several other proteins with leucine-rich motifs, such as the extracellular domains of the thyrotropin and gonadotropin receptors. 

Figure 4.12 Schematic diagram illustrating the role of the conserved leucine residues (green) in the leucine-rich motif in stabilizing the P-loop-(x structural module. In the ribonuclease inhibitor, leucine residues 2, 5, and 7 from the P strand pack against leucine residues 17, 20, and 24 from the a helix as well as leucine residue 12 from the loop to form a hydrophobic core between the P strand and the a helix.

Kobe, B., Deisenhofer, J. Crystal structure of porcine ribonuclease inhibitor, a protein with leucine-rich repeats. Nature 366 751-756, 1993. 

FIGURE 6.23 The three-dimeiisioiial structure of bovine ribonuclease A, showing the o -hehces as ribbons. (Jane Richardson)... 

The secondary and tertiary structures of myoglobin and ribonuclease A illustrate the importance of packing in tertiary structures. Secondary structures pack closely to one another and also intercalate with (insert between) extended polypeptide chains. If the sum of the van der Waals volumes of a protein s constituent amino acids is divided by the volume occupied by the protein, packing densities of 0.72 to 0.77 are typically obtained. This means that, even with close packing, approximately 25% of the total volume of a protein is not occupied by protein atoms. Nearly all of this space is in the form of very small cavities. Cavities the size of water molecules or larger do occasionally occur, but they make up only a small fraction of the total protein volume. It is likely that such cavities provide flexibility for proteins and facilitate conformation changes and a wide range of protein dynamics (discussed later). 

S. Moore and W. H. Stein (Rockefeller, New York) contributions to the understanding of the connection between chemical structure and catalytic activity of the active centre of the ribonuclease molecule. 

William Howard Stein fl 911-1980) was born in New York City and received his Ph.D. in 1938 from the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. He immediately joined the faculty of the Rockefeller Institute, where he remained until his death. In 1972, he shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work with Stanford Moore on developing methods of amino acid analysis and for determining the structure of ribonuclease. 

Covalent bridging of biopolymers is one of the widely occurring prindples in nature for increasing the stability of the tertiary structure, for example the disulfide bridges in keratin and ribonuclease. 

However, there are a number of other miscellaneous biological roles played by this complex. The [Co(NH3)6]3+ ion has been shown to inhibit the hammerhead ribozyme by displacing a Mn2+ ion from the active site.576 However, [Co(NH3)6]3+ does not inhibit ribonuclease H (RNase),577 topoisomerase I,578 or hairpin ribozyme,579 which require activation by Mg2+ ions. The conclusions from these studies were that an outer sphere complex formation between the enzyme and Mgaq2+ is occuring rather than specific coordination of the divalent ion to the protein. These results are in contrast to DNase I inhibition by the same hexaammine complex. Inhibition of glucose-induced insulin secretion from pancreatic cells by [Co(NH3)6]3+ has been found.580 Intracellular injection of [Co(NH3)6]3+ into a neurone has been found to cause characteristic changes to the structure of its mitochondria, and this offers a simple technique to label neuronal profiles for examination of their ultrastructures.581... 

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