Identification of MOAG-4/SERF as a regulator of age-related proteotoxicity.

Fibrillar protein aggregates are the major pathological hallmark of several incurable, age-related, neurodegenerative disorders. These aggregates typically contain aggregation-prone pathogenic proteins, such as amyloid-beta in Alzheimer's disease and alpha-synuclein in Parkinson's disease. It is, however, poorly understood how these aggregates are formed during cellular aging. Here we identify an evolutionarily highly conserved modifier of aggregation, MOAG-4, as a positive regulator of aggregate formation in C. elegans models for polyglutamine diseases. Inactivation of MOAG-4 suppresses the formation of compact polyglutamine aggregation intermediates that are required for aggregate formation. The role of MOAG-4 in driving aggregation extends to amyloid-beta and alpha-synuclein and is evolutionarily conserved in its human orthologs SERF1A and SERF2. MOAG-4/SERF appears to act independently from HSF-1-induced molecular chaperones, proteasomal degradation, and autophagy. Our results suggest that MOAG-4/SERF regulates age-related proteotoxicity through a previously unexplored pathway, which will open up new avenues for research on age-related, neurodegenerative diseases.

MOAG-4 promotes the aggregation of α-synuclein by competing with self-protective electrostatic interactions.

Aberrant protein aggregation underlies a variety of age-related neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. Little is known, however, about the molecular mechanisms that modulate the aggregation process in the cellular environment. Recently, MOAG-4/SERF has been identified as a class of evolutionarily conserved proteins that positively regulates aggregate formation. Here, by using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, we examine the mechanism of action of MOAG-4 by characterizing its interaction with α-synuclein (α-Syn). NMR chemical shift perturbations demonstrate that a positively charged segment of MOAG-4 forms a transiently populated α-helix that interacts with the negatively charged C terminus of α-Syn. This process interferes with the intramolecular interactions between the N- and C-terminal regions of α-Syn, resulting in the protein populating less compact forms and aggregating more readily. These results provide a compelling example of the complex competition between molecular and cellular factors that protect against protein aggregation and those that promote it.

A versatile bacterial expression vector designed for single-step cloning of multiple DNA fragments using homologous recombination.

Production of recombinant proteins is the starting point for biochemical and biophysical analyses and requires methodology to efficiently proceed from gene sequence to purified protein. While optimized strategies for the efficient cloning of single-gene fragments for bacterial expression is available, efficient multiple DNA fragment cloning still presents a challenge. To facilitate this step, we have developed an efficient cloning strategy based on yeast homologous recombination cloning (YHRC) into the new pET-based bacterial expression vector pSUMO-YHRC. The vector supports cloning for untagged expression as well as fusions to His6-SUMO or His6 tags. We demonstrate that YHRC from single PCR products of 6 independent genes into the vector results in virtually no background. Importantly, in a quantitative assay for functional expression we find that single-step YHRC of 7 DNA fragments can be performed with very high cloning efficiencies. The method and reagents described in this paper significantly simplifies the construction of expression plasmids from multiple DNA fragments, including complex gene fusions, chimeric genes and polycistronic constructs.