Ligand discrimination and gating in cyclic nucleotide-gated ion channels from apo and partial agonist-bound cryo-EM structures
- Weill Cornell Medical College, United States
Abstract
Cyclic nucleotide-modulated channels have important roles in visual signal transduction and pacemaking. Binding of cyclic nucleotides (cAMP/cGMP) elicits diverse functional responses in different channels within the family despite their high sequence and structure homology. The molecular mechanisms responsible for ligand discrimination and gating are unknown due to lack of correspondence between structural information and functional states. Using single particle cryo-electron microscopy and single-channel recording, we assigned functional states to high-resolution structures of SthK, a prokaryotic cyclic nucleotide-gated channel. The structures for apo, cAMP-bound, and cGMP-bound SthK in lipid nanodiscs, correspond to no, moderate, and low single-channel activity, respectively, consistent with the observation that all structures are in resting, closed states. The similarity between apo and ligand-bound structures indicates that ligand-binding domains are strongly coupled to pore and SthK gates in an allosteric, concerted fashion. The different orientations of cAMP and cGMP in the 'resting' and 'activated' structures suggest a mechanism for ligand discrimination.
Data availability
The 3 density maps and 3 atomic models have been deposited in PDB under the following accession codes: 6CJQ, 6CJU and 6CJT (coordinates of atomic models), EMD-7482, EMD-7484 and EMD-7483 (density maps).
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apo-bound structure of the prokaryotic SthK channel (coordinates of atomic model)Publicly available at the Electron Microscopy Data Bank (accession no: 6CJQ).
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cAMP-bound structure of the prokaryotic SthK channel (coordinates of atomic model)Publicly available at the Electron Microscopy Data Bank (accession no: 6CJU).
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cGMP-bound structure of the prokaryotic SthK channel (coordinates of atomic model)Publicly available at the Electron Microscopy Data Bank (accession no: 6CJT).
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apo-bound structure of the prokaryotic SthK channel (density map)Publicly available at the Electron Microscopy Data Bank (accession no: EMD-7482).
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cAMP-bound structure of the prokaryotic SthK channel (density map)Publicly available at the Electron Microscopy Data Bank (accession no: EMD-7484).
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cGMP-bound structure of the prokaryotic SthK channel (density map)Publicly available at the Electron Microscopy Data Bank (accession no: EMD-7483).
Article and author information
Author details
Philipp AM Schmidpeter
Funding
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R01GM124451 and R01GM088352)
- Crina M Nimigean
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SCHM 3198/1-1)
- Philipp AM Schmidpeter
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Richard Aldrich, The University of Texas at Austin, United States
Version history
- Received: July 2, 2018
- Accepted: July 19, 2018
- Accepted Manuscript published: July 20, 2018 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: August 15, 2018 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2018, Rheinberger et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Ligand discrimination and gating in cyclic nucleotide-gated ion channels from apo and partial agonist-bound cryo-EM structures
eLife 7:e39775.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.39775
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