Protein aggregation is linked to more than 30 human pathologies, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. Since small oligomers that form at the beginning of the fibrillation process probably are the most toxic elements, therapeutic strategies involving fibril fragmentation could be detrimental. An alternative approach, named kinetic inhibition, aims to prevent fibril formation by using small ligands that stabilize the parent protein. The factors that govern fibrillation lag times during kinetic inhibition are largely unknown, notwithstanding their importance for designing effective long-term therapies. Inhibitor-bound species are not likely to be incorporated into the core of mature fibrils, although their presence could alter the kinetics of the fibrillation process. For instance, inhibitor-bound species may act as capping elements that impair the nucleation process and/or fibril growth. Here, we address this issue by studying the effect of two natural inhibitors on the fibrillation behavior of lysozyme at neutral pH. We analyzed a set of 79 fibrillation curves obtained in lysozyme alone and a set of 37 obtained in the presence of inhibitors. We calculated the concentrations of the relevant species at the beginning of the curves using the inhibitor-binding constants measured under the same experimental conditions. We found that inhibitor-bound protein species do not affect fibrillation onset times, which are mainly determined by the concentration of unbound protein species present in equilibrium. In this system, knowledge of the fibrillation kinetics and inhibitor affinities suffices to predict the effect of kinetic inhibitors on fibrillation lag times. In addition, we developed a new methodology to better estimate fibrillation lag times from experimental curves.

Calreticulin is an abundant endoplasmic reticulum resident protein that fulfills at least two basic functions. Firstly, due to its ability to bind monoglucosylated high mannose oligosaccharides, calreticulin is a central component of the folding quality control system of glycoproteins. On the other hand, thanks to its capacity to bind high amounts of calcium, calreticulin is one of the main calcium buffers in the endoplasmic reticulum. This last activity resides on a highly negatively charged domain located at the C terminus. Interestingly, this domain has been proposed to regulate the intracellular localization of calreticulin. Structural information for this domain is currently scarce. Here we address this issue by employing a combination of biophysical techniques and molecular dynamics simulation. We found that calreticulin C-terminal domain at low calcium concentration displays a disordered structure, whereas calcium addition induces a more rigid and compact conformation. Remarkably, this change develops when calcium concentration varies within a range similar to that taking place in the endoplasmic reticulum upon physiological fluctuations. In addition, a much higher calcium concentration is necessary to attain similar responses in a peptide displaying a randomized sequence of calreticulin C-terminal domain, illustrating the sequence specificity of this effect. Molecular dynamics simulation reveals that this ordering effect is a consequence of the ability of calcium to bring into close proximity residues that lie apart in the primary structure. These results place calreticulin in a new setting in which the protein behaves not only as a calcium-binding protein but as a finely tuned calcium sensor.

For most secretory pathway proteins, crossing the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) membrane is an irreversible process. However, in some cases this flow can be reversed. For instance, misfolded proteins retained in the ER are retrotranslocated to the cytosol to be degraded by the proteasome. This mechanism, known as ER associated degradation (ERAD), is exploited by several bacterial toxins to gain access to the cytosol. Interestingly, some ER resident proteins can also be detected in the cytosol or nucleus, calreticulin (CRT) being the most studied. Here we show that in Trypanosoma cruzi a minor fraction of CRT localized to the cytosol. ER calcium depletion, but not increasing cytosolic calcium, triggered the retrotranslocation of CRT in a relatively short period of time. Cytosolic CRT was subsequently degraded by the proteasome. Interestingly, the single disulfide bridge of CRT is reduced when the protein is located in the cytosol. The effect exerted by ER calcium was strictly dependent on the C-terminal domain (CRT-C), since a CRT lacking it was totally retained in the ER, whereas the localization of an unrelated protein fused to CRT-C mirrored that of endogenous CRT. This finding expands the regulatory mechanisms of protein sorting and may represent a new crossroad between diverse physiological processes.

Nearly one third of the eukaryotic proteome traverses the secretory pathway and most of these proteins are N-glycosylated in the lumen of the endoplasmic reticulum. N-glycans fulfill multiple structural and biological functions, and are crucial for productive folding of many glycoproteins. N-glycosylation involves the attachment of an oligosaccharide to selected asparagine residues in the sequence N-X-S/T (X ≠ P), a motif known as an N-glycosylation’sequon’. Mutations that create novel sequons can cause disease due to the destabilizing effect of a bulky N-glycan. Thus, an analogous process must have occurred during evolution, whenever ancestrally cytosolic proteins were recruited to the secretory pathway. Here, we show that during evolution N-glycosylation triggered a dual selection pressure on secretory pathway proteins: while sequons were positively selected in solvent exposed regions, they were almost completely eliminated from buried sites. This process is one of the sharpest evolutionary signatures of secretory pathway proteins, and was therefore critical for the evolution of an efficient secretory pathway.