SUMMARY The redox-regulated chaperone Hsp33 protects organisms against oxidative stress that leads to protein unfolding. Activation of Hsp33 is triggered by the oxidative unfolding of its own redox-sensor domain, making Hsp33 a member of a recently discovered class of chaperones that require partial unfolding for full chaperone activity. Here we address the long-standing question of how chaperones recognize client proteins. We show that Hsp33 uses its own intrinsically disordered regions to discriminate between unfolded and partially structured folding intermediates. Binding to secondary structure elements in client proteins stabilizes Hsp33’s intrinsically disordered regions, and this stabilization appears to mediate Hsp33’s high affinity for structured folding intermediates. Return to nonstress conditions reduces Hsp33’s disulfide bonds, which then significantly destabilizes the bound client proteins and in doing so converts them into less-structured, folding-competent client proteins of ATP-dependent foldases. We propose a model in which energy-independent chaperones use internal order-to-disorder transitions to control substrate binding and release.

The detection and quantitation of protein-ligand binding interactions is critical in a number of different areas of biochemical research from fundamental studies of biological processes to drug discovery efforts. Described here is a protocol that can be used to identify the protein targets of biologically relevant ligands (e.g. drugs like tamoxifen or cyclosporin A) in complex protein mixtures such as cell lysates. The protocol utilizes quantitative, bottom-up, shotgun proteomics technologies (iTRAQ) with a covalent labeling technique, termed Stability of Proteins from Rates of Oxidation (SPROX). In SPROX, the thermodynamic properties of proteins and protein-ligand complexes are assessed using the hydrogen peroxide-mediated oxidation of methionine residues as a function of the chemical denaturant (e.g. guanidine Hydrochloride or urea) concentration. The proteome-wide SPROX experiments described here enable the ligand binding properties of hundreds of proteins to be simultaneously assayed in the context of complex biological samples. The proteomic capabilities of the protocol render it amenable to detection of both the on- and off-target effects of ligand binding.