Structural Basis for Dimerization Quality Control
Published as: Nature. 2020 October ; 586(7829): 452–456. HHMI Author ManuscriptHHMI Author Manuscript HHMI Author Manuscript HHMI Author Structural basis for dimerization quality control Elijah L. Mena1, Predrag Jevtić1,2,*, Basil J. Greber3,4,*, Christine L. Gee1,2,*, Brandon G. Lew1,2, David Akopian1, Eva Nogales1,2,3,4, John Kuriyan1,2,3,4,5, Michael Rape1,2,3,# 1Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley CA 94720, USA 2Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley CA 94720, USA 3California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA 4Molecular Biophysics and Integrative Bio-Imaging Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA 5Department of Chemistry, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley CA 94720, USA Abstract Most quality control pathways target misfolded proteins to prevent toxic aggregation and neurodegeneration 1. Dimerization quality control (DQC) further improves proteostasis by eliminating complexes of aberrant composition 2, yet how it detects incorrect subunits is still unknown. Here, we provide structural insight into target selection by SCFFBXL17, a DQC E3 ligase that ubiquitylates and helps degrade inactive heterodimers of BTB proteins, while sparing functional homodimers. We find that SCFFBXL17 disrupts aberrant BTB dimers that fail to stabilize an intermolecular β-sheet around a highly divergent β-strand of the BTB domain. Complex dissociation allows SCFFBXL17 to wrap around a single BTB domain for robust ubiquitylation. SCFFBXL17 therefore probes both shape and complementarity of BTB domains, a mechanism that is well suited to establish quality control of complex composition for recurrent interaction modules.
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