YcdB from Escherichia coli reveals a novel class of Tat-dependently translocated hemoproteins

authored by
Alexander Sturm, Angelika Schierhorn, Ute Lindenstrauss, Hauke Lilie, Thomas Brüser
Abstract

The Tat (twin-arginine translocation) system of Escherichia coli serves to translocate folded proteins across the cytoplasmic membrane. The reasons established so far for the Tat dependence are cytoplasmic cofactor assembly and/or heterodimerization of the respective proteins. We were interested in the reasons for the Tat dependence of novel Tat substrates and focused on two uncharacterized proteins, YcdO and YcdB. Both proteins contain predicted Tat signal sequences. However, we found that only YcdB was indeed Tat-dependently translocated, whereas YcdO was equally well translocated in a Tat-deficient strain. YcdB is a dimeric protein and contains a heme cofactor that was identified to be a high-spin FeIII-protoporphyrin IX complex. In contrast to all other periplasmic hemoproteins analyzed so far, heme was assembled into YcdB in the cytoplasm, suggesting that heme assembly could take place prior to translocation. The function of YcdB in the periplasm may be related to a detoxification reaction under specific conditions because YcdB had peroxidase activity at acidic pH, which coincides well with the known acid-induced expression of the gene. The data demonstrate the existence of a class of heme-containing Tat substrates, the first member of which is YcdB.

Organisation(s)
Institute of Microbiology
External Organisation(s)
Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg
Max Planck Research Unit for Enzymology of Protein Folding
Type
Article
Journal
Journal of Biological Chemistry
Volume
281
Pages
13972-13978
No. of pages
7
ISSN
0021-9258
Publication date
19.05.2006
Publication status
Published
Peer reviewed
Yes
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Cell Biology
Electronic version(s)
https://doi.org/10.1074/jbc.M511891200 (Access: Open)