Steric clashes with bound OMP peptides activate the DegS stress-response protease.

ABSTRACT: Escherichia coli senses envelope stress using a signaling cascade initiated when DegS cleaves a transmembrane inhibitor of a transcriptional activator for response genes. Each subunit of the DegS trimer contains a protease domain and a PDZ domain. During stress, unassembled outer-membrane proteins (OMPs) accumulate in the periplasm and their C-terminal peptides activate DegS by binding to its PDZ domains. In the absence of stress, autoinhibitory interactions, mediated by the L3 loop, stabilize inactive DegS, but it is not known how this autoinhibition is reversed during activation. Here, we show that OMP peptides initiate a steric clash between the PDZ domain and the L3 loop that results in a structural rearrangement of the loop and breaking of autoinhibitory interactions. Many different L

SUBMITTER: de Regt AK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4371955 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature