2o97
From Proteopedia
Crystal Structure of E. coli HU heterodimer
Overview
We determined the crystal structure of the Escherichia coli nucleoid-associated HUalphabeta protein by x-ray diffraction and observed that the heterodimers form multimers with octameric units in three potential arrangements, which may serve specialized roles in different DNA transaction reactions. It is of special importance that one of the structures forms spiral filaments with left-handed rotations. A negatively superhelical DNA can be modeled to wrap around this left-handed HUalphabeta multimer. Whereas the wild-type HU generated negative DNA supercoiling in vitro, an engineered heterodimer with an altered amino acid residue critical for the formation of the left-handed spiral protein in the crystal was defective in the process, thus providing the structural explanation for the classical property of HU to restrain negative supercoils in DNA.
About this Structure
2O97 is a Protein complex structure of sequences from Escherichia coli. Full crystallographic information is available from OCA.
Reference
Spiral structure of Escherichia coli HUalphabeta provides foundation for DNA supercoiling., Guo F, Adhya S, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 Mar 13;104(11):4309-14. Epub 2007 Mar 5. PMID:17360520 Page seeded by OCA on Sun May 4 10:28:54 2008
