Journal
PLOS ONE
Volume 7, Issue 10, Pages -Publisher
PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0046804
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Funding
- Italian Ministero Istruzione Universita e Ricerca (MIUR) [Gottex60%-08, FR-GOTTEG-09]
- University of Verona, Italy
- Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion (MICINN) [CTQ2010-21567-C02-02]
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Bovine seminal (BS) RNase, the unique natively dimeric member of the RNase super-family, represents a special case not only for its additional biological actions but also for the singular features of 3D domain swapping. The native enzyme is indeed a mixture of two isoforms: M = M, a dimer held together by two inter-subunit disulfide bonds, and MxM, 70% of the total, which, besides the two mentioned disulfides, is additionally stabilized by the swapping of its N-termini. When lyophilized from 40% acetic acid, BS-RNase oligomerizes as the super-family proto-type RNase A does. In this paper, we induced BS-RNase self-association and analyzed the multimers by size-exclusion chromatography, cross-linking, electrophoresis, mutagenesis, dynamic light scattering, molecular modelling. Finally, we evaluated their enzymatic and cytotoxic activities. Several BS-RNase domain-swapped oligomers were detected, including two tetramers, one exchanging only the N-termini, the other being either N- or C-swapped. The C-swapping event, confirmed by results on a BS-K113N mutant, has been firstly seen in BS-RNase here, and probably stabilizes also multimers larger than tetramers. Interestingly, all BS-RNase oligomers are more enzymatically active than the native dimer and, above all, they display a cytotoxic activity that definitely increases with the molecular weight of the multimers. This latter feature, to date unknown for BS-RNase, suggests again that the self-association of RNases strongly modulates their biological and potentially therapeutic properties.
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