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Crystal structure of a small heat-shock protein

Nature volume 394, pages 595–599 (1998)Cite this article

Abstract

The principal heat-shock proteins that have chaperone activity (that is, they protect newly made proteins from misfolding) belong to five conserved classes: HSP100, HSP90, HSP70, HSP60 and the small heat-shock proteins (sHSPs). The sHSPs can form large multimeric structures and have a wide range of cellular functions, including endowing cells with thermotolerance in vivo1,2 and being able to act as molecular chaperones in vitro3,4,5,6,7,8; sHSPs do this by forming stable complexes with folding intermediates of their protein substrates9,10. However, there is little information available about these structures or the mechanism by which substrates are protected from thermal denaturation by sHSPs. Here we report the crystal structure of a small heat-shock protein from Methanococcus jannaschii, a hyperthermophilic archaeon. The monomeric folding unit is a composite β-sandwich in which one of the β-strands comes from a neighbouring molecule. Twenty-four monomers form a hollow spherical complex of octahedral symmetry, with eight trigonal and six square ‘windows’. The sphere has an outer diameter of 120 Å and an inner diameter of 65 Å.

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Figure 1: Sequence alignment of HSP16.5 with other small heat-shock proteins and α-crystallins.
Figure 2: Representative region of the experimental electron density map contoured at 1.2σ.
Figure 3: Overall structure of sHSP.
Figure 4: Subunit interaction of sHSP.

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Acknowledgements

We thank D. King for doing the electrospray mass spectrometry; H. Yokota for help with protein preparation, D. Boisvert for critical discussion of the manuscript, and R. Sweet at the NSLS for data collection. This work was funded by the US Department of Energy (R.K. and S.-H.K.).

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  1. Physical Biosciences Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Department of Chemistry, University of California at Berkeley, 220 Melvin Calvin Laboratory, Berkeley, 94720-5230, California, USA

    Kyeong Kyu Kim, Rosalind Kim & Sung-Hou Kim

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  1. Kyeong Kyu Kim
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Correspondence to Sung-Hou Kim.

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Kim, K., Kim, R. & Kim, SH. Crystal structure of a small heat-shock protein. Nature 394, 595–599 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/29106

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