Crystal structure of a novel archaeal AAA+ ATPase SSO1545 from Sulfolobus solfataricus

Signal transduction ATPases with numerous domains (STAND), a large class of P-loop NTPases, belong to AAA+ ATPases. They include AP(apoptotic)-ATPases (e.g., animal apoptosis regulators CED4/Apaf-1, plant disease resistance proteins, and bacterial AfsR-like transcription regulators), NACHT NTPases (e.g. CARD4, NAIP, Het-E-1, TLP1), and several other less well-characterized families. STAND differ from other P-loop NTPases by their unique sequence motifs, which include an hhGRExE (h, hydrophobic; x, any residue) motif at the N-terminal region, a GxP/GxxP motif at the C-terminal region of the NTPase domain, in addition to a C-terminal helical domain and additional domains such as WD40, TPR, LRR or catalytic modules. Despite significant biological interests, structural coverage of STAND proteins is very limited and only two other structures are currently known: the cell death regulators Apaf-1 and CED-4. Here, we report the crystal structure of SSO1545 from Sulfolobus solfataricus, which was determined using the semi-automated, high-throughput pipeline of the Joint Center for Structural Genomics (JCSG; http://www.jcsg.org), as part of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences' Protein Structure Initiative (PSI). SSO1545 (NP-342973.1), a representative of the archaeal STANDs, is a member of Pfam PF01637 and encodes a protein of 356 residues with calculated molecular weight and isoelectric point of 41.7 kD and 8.2, respectively.