Sequential Assembly of an Active RNA Polymerase Molecule at the Air-Water Interface

Ganguly, Abantika and Chatterji, Dipankar (2011) Sequential Assembly of an Active RNA Polymerase Molecule at the Air-Water Interface. In: Langmuir, 27 (7). pp. 3808-3814.

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Abstract

At the heart of understanding cellular processes lies our ability to explore the specific nature of communication between sequential information carrying biopolymers. However, the data extracted from conventional solution phase studies may not reflect the dynamics of communication between recognized partners as they occur in the crowded cellular milieu. We use the principle of immobilization of histidine-tagged biopolymers at a Ni(II)-encoded Langmuir monolayer to study sequence-specific protein-protein interactions in an artificially crowded environment The advantage of this technique lies in increasing the surface density of one of the interacting partners that allows us to study macromolecular interactions in a controlled crowded environment, but without compromising the speed of the reactions. We have taken advantage of this technique to follow the sequential assembly process of the multiprotein complex Escherichia coil RNA polymerase at the interface and also deciphered the role of one of the proteins, omega (omega), in the assembly pathway. Our reconstitution studies indicate that in the absence of molecular chaperones or other cofactors, omega (omega) plays a decisive role in refolding the largest protein beta prime (beta') and its recruitment into the multimeric assembly to reconstitute an active RNA polymerase. It was also observed that the monolayer had the ability to distinguish between sequence-specific and -nonspecific interactions despite the immobilization of one of the biomacromolecules. The technique provides a universal two-dimensional template for studying protein-ligand interactions while mimicking molecular crowding.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	Langmuir
Publisher:	American Chemical Society
Additional Information:	Copyright of this article belongs to American Chemical Society.
Department/Centre:	Division of Biological Sciences > Molecular Biophysics Unit
Date Deposited:	06 May 2011 05:11
Last Modified:	06 May 2011 05:11
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/37379

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