Formation and activity of template-assembled receptor signaling complexes

Problems in membrane biology require methods to recreate the interactions between receptors and cytoplasmic signaling proteins at the membrane surface. Here, unilamellar vesicles composed of 1,2-dioleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine and a nickel-chelating lipid were used as templates to direct the assembly of proteins from the Escherichia coli chemotaxis signaling pathway. The bacterial chemoreceptors are known to form clusters, which promote the binding of the adaptor protein (CheW) and the kinase (CheA). When CheA was incubated with vesicles, CheW, and a histidine-tagged cytoplasmic domain fragment of the aspartate chemoreceptor (CF), the kinase activity was stimulated similar to 300-fold. Activity and pull-down assays were used with dynamic light scattering and electron microscopy to characterize the protein-vesicle compositions that were correlated with the high levels of activity, which demonstrated that CF-CheW-CheA complexes on the vesicle surface were the active entities. Assembly and stimulation occurred with vesicles of different sizes and CFs in different extents of glutamine substitution (in place of glutamate) at physiologically relevant sites. An exception was the combination of sonicated vesicles with the unsubstituted CF, which displayed lower CheA activity. The lower activity was attributed to the high curvature of the sonicated vesicles and a weaker tendency of the unsubstituted CF to self-assemble. Electron micrographs of the vesicle-protein assemblies revealed that protein binding induced pronounced changes in vesicle shape, which was consistent with the introduction of positive curvature in the outer leaflet of the bilayer. Overall, vesicle-mediated template-directed assembly is shown to be an effective way to form functional complexes of membrane-associated proteins and suggests that significant changes in membrane shape can be involved in the process of transmembrane signaling.