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Structural adaptation of the plant protease Deg1 to repair photosystem II during light exposure

Nature Structural & Molecular Biology volume 18, pages 728–731 (2011)Cite this article

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Abstract

Deg1 is a chloroplastic protease involved in maintaining the photosynthetic machinery. Structural and biochemical analyses reveal that the inactive Deg1 monomer is transformed into the proteolytically active hexamer at acidic pH. The change in pH is sensed by His244, which upon protonation, repositions a specific helix to trigger oligomerization. This system ensures selective activation of Deg1 during daylight, when acidification of the thylakoid lumen occurs and photosynthetic proteins are damaged.

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Figure 1: Crystal structure of Deg1.
Figure 2: pH-dependent change in oligomeric state and protease activity.
Figure 3: Model of Deg1 regulation.

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Acknowledgements

We thank R. Huber Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry and J.M. Peters Research Institute of Molecular Pathology for critical reading of the manuscript and helpful discussion, D. Charuvi (Hebrew University) for calculating the volume of the thylakoid lumen and C. Wilken Research Institute of Molecular Pathology for help with crystallizing Deg1. Crystallographic experiments were conducted at the beamline ID14-EH4 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. This research was supported in part by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation to Z.A. The Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) is funded by Boehringer Ingelheim.

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Author notes

  1. Juliane Kley, Bastian Schmidt and Boril Boyanov: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), Vienna, Austria

    Juliane Kley, Bastian Schmidt, Boril Boyanov, Peggy C Stolt-Bergner, Rebecca Kirk & Tim Clausen

  2. Centre for Medical Biotechnology, Faculty of Biology, University Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

    Michael Ehrmann

  3. The Robert H. Smith Institute of Plant Sciences and Genetics in Agriculture, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rehovot, Israel

    Ronit R Knopf, Leah Naveh & Zach Adam

Authors
  1. Juliane Kley
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  9. Zach Adam
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Contributions

J.K., B.S., B.B., R.K., R.R.K. and L.N. did the experiments and analyzed the data; P.C.S.-B., M.E. and Z.A. designed experiments and commented on the manuscript; and T.C. coordinated the project, designed experiments, analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Zach Adam or Tim Clausen.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Supplementary Figures 1–9, Supplementary Tables 1 and 2, and Supplementary Methods (PDF 1369 kb)

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Kley, J., Schmidt, B., Boyanov, B. et al. Structural adaptation of the plant protease Deg1 to repair photosystem II during light exposure. Nat Struct Mol Biol 18, 728–731 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nsmb.2055

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