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Summary While structural symmetry is a prevailing feature of homo-oligomeric proteins, asymmetry provides unique mechanistic opportunities. We present the crystal structure of full-length TRAP1, the mitochondrial Hsp90 molecular chaperone, in a catalytically active closed state. The TRAP1 homodimer adopts a distinct, asymmetric conformation, where one protomer is reconfigured via a helix swap at the Middle:C-terminal Domain (MD:CTD) interface. Importantly, this interface plays a critical role in client binding. Solution methods validate the asymmetry and show extension to Hsp90 homologs. Point mutations that disrupt unique contacts at each MD:CTD interface reduce catalytic activity, substrate binding, and demonstrate that each protomer needs access to both conformations. Crystallographic data on a dimeric NTD:MD fragment suggests that asymmetry arises from strain induced by simultaneous NTD and CTD dimerization. The observed asymmetry provides the potential for an additional step in the ATPase cycle, allowing sequential ATP hydrolysis steps to drive both client remodeling and client release.

Conventional protein structure determination from nuclear magnetic resonance data relies heavily on side-chain proton-proton distances. The necessary side-chain resonance assignment, however, is labor intensive and prone to error. Here we show that structures can be accurately determined without NMR information on the sidechains for proteins up to 25 kDa by incorporating backbone chemical shifts, residual dipolar couplings, and amide proton distances into the Rosetta protein structure modelling methodology. These data, which are too sparse for conventional methods, serve only to guide conformational search towards the lowest energy conformations in the folding landscape; the details of the computed models are determined by the physical chemistry implicit in the Rosetta all atom energy function. The new method is not hindered by the deuteration required to suppress nuclear relaxation processes for proteins greater than 15 kDa, and should enable routine NMR structure determination for larger proteins.The first step in protein structure determination by NMR is chemical shift assignment for the backbone atoms. In contrast to the subsequent assignment of the sidechains, this is now rapid, reliable, and largely automated (1-5). Global backbone structural information complementing the local structure information provided by backbone chemical shift assignments (6,7), can be obtained from H N -H N NOESY, residual dipolar coupling (RDC) (8), and other (9,10) experiments. For larger proteins, deuteration becomes necessary to circumvent the efficient spin relaxation properties resulting from their higher rotational correlation times (11,12), but removing protons also eliminates long range NOESY information from sidechains except for selectively protonated sidechain moieties (13). The difficulty in determining accurate structures with no or limited sidechain information is a # To whom correspondence should be addressed. Phone: (206) 543-1295, Fax: (206) Here we show that structures of proteins up to 200 residues (23 kDa) can be determined using information from backbone (H N , N, C α , C β , C') NMR data by taking advantage of the conformational sampling and all atom energy function in the Rosetta structure prediction methodology, which for small proteins in favorable cases can produce atomic accuracy models starting from sequence information alone(15). Structure prediction in Rosetta proceeds in two steps; first a low resolution exploration phase using Monte-Carlo fragment assembly and a coarse-grained energy function, and second a computationally expensive refinement phase which cycles between combinatorial sidechain optimization and gradientbased minimization of all torsional degrees of freedom in a physically-realistic all-atom forcefield(15). The primary obstacle to Rosetta structure prediction from amino acid sequence information alone is conformational sampling; native structures almost always have lower energies than non-native conformations, but are very seldom sampled in unbiased trajectories. Incorpora...

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