Peroxiredoxins (Prxs) were not recognized as a family of enzymes until the 1990s but are now known to be the dominant peroxidases in most organisms. Here, the history and fundamental properties of peroxiredoxins are briefly reviewed, with a special focus on describing how an exquisitely tunable balance between fully folded...
Crystallizing a virus can be difficult and not always successful. Forty-eight salts, buffers, and precipitating agents were used in the hanging drop preparations in attempts to crystallize the San Miguel sea lion virus type 5 (SMSV-5). The first attempt resulted in 22 of the 48 solutions forming a precipitate. The...
The quality of macromolecular crystal structures depends, in part, on the quality and quantity of the data used to produce them. Here, we review recent shifts in our understanding of how to use data quality indicators to select a high resolution cutoff that leads to the best model, and of...
Lactate monooxygenase (LMO) catalyzes the FMN-dependent "coupled" oxidation of lactate and O-2 to acetate, carbon dioxide, and water, involving pyruvate and hydrogen peroxide as enzyme-bound intermediates. Other alpha-hydroxy acid oxidase family members follow an "uncoupled pathway," wherein the alpha-keto acid product quickly dissociates before the reduced flavin reacts with oxygen....
Dynein light chain LC8 is a small, dimeric, and very highly conserved globular protein that is an integral part of the dynein and myosin molecular motors but appears to have a broader role in multiple protein complexes unrelated to molecular motors. LC8 binds to two families of targets: those having...
Dynein light chain LC8 is a small, dimeric, and very highly conserved globular protein that is an integral part of the dynein and myosin molecular motors but appears to have a broader role in multiple protein complexes unrelated to molecular motors. LC8 binds to two families of targets: those having...
Full Text:
the Diverse Interactions of Dynein
Light Chain LC8
Gregory Benison, P. AndrewKarplus and Elisar
Dynein light chain LC8 is a small, dimeric, and very highly conserved globular protein that is an integral part of the dynein and myosin molecular motors but appears to have a broader role in multiple protein complexes unrelated to molecular motors. LC8 binds to two families of targets: those having...
Peroxiredoxins (Prxs) make up an ancient family of enzymes that are the predominant peroxidases for nearly all organisms and play essential roles in reducing hydrogen peroxide, organic hydroperoxides, and peroxynitrite. Even between distantly related organisms, the core protein fold and key catalytic residues related to its cysteine-based catalytic mechanism have...
In some bacteria, cysteine is converted to cysteine sulfinic acid by cysteine dioxygenases (CDO) that are only ∼15–30% identical in sequence to mammalian CDOs. Among bacterial proteins having this range of sequence similarity to mammalian CDO are some that conserve an active site Arg residue (“Arg-type” enzymes) and some having...
The site-specific incorporation of non-canonical amino acids (ncAAs) into proteins is an important tool for understanding biological function. Traditionally, each new ncAA targeted requires a resource-consuming process of generating new ncAA aminoacyl tRNA synthetase/tRNACUA pairs. However, the discovery that some tRNA synthetases are “permissive,” in that they can incorporate multiple...
