Crystal structure of the plasmid maintenance system ɛ/ζ: Functional mechanism of toxin ζ and inactivation by ɛ 2 ζ 2 complex formation
- 5 February 2003
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Vol. 100 (4) , 1661-1666
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0434325100
Abstract
Programmed cell death in prokaryotes is frequently found as postsegregational killing. It relies on antitoxin/toxin systems that secure stable inheritance of low and medium copy number plasmids during cell division and kill cells that have lost the plasmid. The broad-host-range, low-copy-number plasmid pSM19035 from Streptococcus pyogenes carries the genes encoding the antitoxin/toxin system ɛ/ζ and antibiotic resistance proteins, among others. The crystal structure of the biologically nontoxic ɛ 2 ζ 2 protein complex at a 1.95-Å resolution and site-directed mutagenesis showed that free ζ acts as phosphotransferase by using ATP/GTP. In ɛ 2 ζ 2 , the toxin ζ is inactivated because the N-terminal helix of the antitoxin ɛ blocks the ATP/GTP-binding site. To our knowledge, this is the first prokaryotic postsegregational killing system that has been entirely structurally characterized.Keywords
This publication has 34 references indexed in Scilit:
- Complete Genome Sequence of a Virulent Isolate of Streptococcus pneumoniaeScience, 2001
- Gapped BLAST and PSI-BLAST: a new generation of protein database search programsNucleic Acids Research, 1997
- Errors in protein structuresNature, 1996
- Reduced surface: An efficient way to compute molecular surfacesBiopolymers, 1996
- Protein kinases — structure and functionFEBS Letters, 1995
- CLUSTAL W: improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment through sequence weighting, position-specific gap penalties and weight matrix choiceNucleic Acids Research, 1994
- Protein Structure Comparison by Alignment of Distance MatricesJournal of Molecular Biology, 1993
- MOLSCRIPT: a program to produce both detailed and schematic plots of protein structuresJournal of Applied Crystallography, 1991
- Improved methods for building protein models in electron density maps and the location of errors in these modelsActa Crystallographica Section A Foundations of Crystallography, 1991
- The P-loop — a common motif in ATP- and GTP-binding proteinsTrends in Biochemical Sciences, 1990