Structural Characterization of Proteins with an Attached ATCUN Motif by Paramagnetic Relaxation Enhancement NMR Spectroscopy

The use of a short, three-residue Cu2+-binding sequence, the ATCUN motif, is presented as an approach for extracting long-range distance restraints from relaxation enhancement NMR spectroscopy. The ATCUN motif is prepended to the N-termini of proteins and binds Cu2+ with a very high affinity. Relaxation rates of amide protons in ATCUN-tagged protein in the presence and absence of Cu2+ can be converted into distance restraints and used for structure refinement by using a new routine, PMAG, that has been written for the structure calculation program CNS. The utility of the approach is demonstrated with an application to ATCUN-tagged ubiquitin. Excellent agreement between measured relaxation rates and those calculated on the basis of the X-ray structure of the protein have been obtained.