期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2017
卷号：114
期号：10
页码：2598-2603
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1616576114
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：The Bam complex assembles β-barrel proteins into the outer membrane (OM) of Gram-negative bacteria. These proteins comprise cylindrical β-sheets with long extracellular loops and create pores to allow passage of nutrients and waste products across the membrane. Despite their functional importance, several questions remain about how these proteins are assembled into the OM after their synthesis in the cytoplasm and secretion across the inner membrane. To understand this process better, we studied the assembly of an essential β-barrel substrate for the Bam complex, BamA. By mutating conserved residues in the β-barrel domain of this protein, we generated three assembly-defective BamA substrates that stall early in the folding process in the periplasm. Two of the three defective substrates, which harbor mutations within β-strands, fail to associate productively with the Bam complex. The third substrate, which harbors mutations in a conserved extracellular loop, accumulates on BamD during assembly, but does not integrate efficiently into the membrane. The assembly of all three substrates can be restored by artificially tethering a region of the substrate, which ultimately becomes an extracellular loop, to the lumen of the forming β-barrel. These results imply that a critical step in the folding process involves the interaction of residues on the interior of the nascent β-barrel wall with residues in one of the extracellular loops. We conclude that a prerequisite for membrane integration of β-barrel proteins is burial of the extracellular loops within the forming β-barrel.
关键词：β-barrel ; Bam complex ; outer membrane ; protein folding
