Prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells exposed to heat and other cellular stresses synthesize several classes of highly conserved stress proteins (1). These protein families act as molecular chaperones by preventing the aggregation of nonnative polypeptides and providing the guideline for their correct folding. Heat shock protein 90 (hsp90) 1 is one of the most abundant proteins in eukaryotic cells under heat shock and stress conditions and is also constitutively expressed, representing 1-2% of the total cellular protein in the majority of eukaryotic cells growing in unstressed conditions (2). hsp90 acts in complex with a set of partner proteins to assist target protein folding (for a review, see Ref.3).Sequence alignments and proteolytic digests have shown that hsp90 is composed of well conserved N-terminal and Cterminal domains linked by a charged hinge region variable in length (4). X-ray crystallographic studies of the N-terminal domain (residues 1-220) of yeast and human hsp90 allowed the identification of the ATP-Mg/ADP-Mg binding site, which can be blocked by high affinity inhibitors such as the antibiotic geldanamycin (GA) (5, 6) or radicicol (7). This site is responsible for the ATPase activity of the chaperone (8). Via the ATPbinding site, the N-terminal domain seems to regulate hsp90 conformation (9) and contains a chaperone site involved in the binding of target proteins (8). In contrast to the N terminus, the three-dimensional structure of the C-terminal domain of hsp90 is still unknown. This domain contains a second chaperone site, which has different polypeptide specificity from the N-terminal one (10). Moreover, the C-terminal region seems to be involved in both dimerization (11-13) and oligomerization (14) of hsp90. The mechanism of dimer formation has been proposed to take place through the duplicate anti-parallel interaction of fragments 542-615 and 629 -731 (12). ATP binding and hydrolysis produce conformational changes that involve the entire hsp90 molecule, and the C-terminal region of hsp90 seems important for trapping the nucleotide during the ATPase cycle (15, 16). Moreover, a second ATP-binding site located in hsp90 C terminus was suggested through the use of ATP-Sepharose affinity chromatography (17); however, the association constant and stoichiometry of the complex with ATP were not determined. Thus, characterization of the C-terminal domain interaction with nucleotides is crucial to understand the hsp90 function. Therefore, we expressed C-and N-terminal domains separately and applied differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC), and fluorescence spectroscopy to directly prove that hsp90 contains a second ATP-binding site located in the C-terminal part of the protein and to determine the association constant for C-hsp90⅐ATP-Mg complex. Then we compared this value with the binding constant obtained for the full-length protein and hypothesized the localization of the second ATP-binding site.
EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURES hsp90 Purification and Expression of N-and...