1am4: Difference between revisions

[[Image:1am4.gif|left|200px]]<br /><applet load="1am4" size="350" color="white" frame="true" align="right" spinBox="true"  

Small G proteins transduce signals from plasma-membrane receptors to control a wide range of cellular functions. These proteins are clustered into distinct families but all act as molecular switches, active in their GTP-bound form but inactive when GDP-bound. The Rho family of G proteins, which includes Cdc42Hs, activate effectors involved in the regulation of cytoskeleton formation, cell proliferation and the JNK signalling pathway. G proteins generally have a low intrinsic GTPase hydrolytic activity but there are family-specific groups of GTPase-activating proteins (GAPs) that enhance the rate of GTP hydrolysis by up to 10(5) times. We report here the crystal structure of Cdc42Hs, with the non-hydrolysable GTP analogue GMPPNP, in complex with the GAP domain of p50rhoGAP at 2.7A resolution. In the complex Cdc42Hs interacts, mainly through its switch I and II regions, with a shallow pocket on rhoGAP which is lined with conserved residues. Arg 85 of rhoGAP interacts with the P-loop of Cdc42Hs, but from biochemical data and by analogy with the G-protein subunit G(i alpha1), we propose that it adopts a different conformation during the catalytic cycle which enables it to stabilize the transition state of the GTP-hydrolysis reaction.

1AM4 is a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_complex Protein complex] structure of sequences from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens Homo sapiens] with <scene name='pdbligand=MG:'>MG</scene> and <scene name='pdbligand=GNP:'>GNP</scene> as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ligands ligands]. Full crystallographic information is available from [http://oca.weizmann.ac.il/oca-bin/ocashort?id=1AM4 OCA].  

[[Category: Gamblin, S J.]]

[[Category: Smerdon, S J.]]

''Page seeded by [http://oca.weizmann.ac.il/oca OCA ] on Thu Feb 21 11:45:56 2008''