3-D Electron Crystallography Reveals the “Off” State of Smooth Muscle Myosin.

Abstract

Abstract The activity of myosin II from vertebrate smooth and non-muscle cells is controlled by phosphorylation of the regulatory light chain (RLC). Smooth muscle heavy meromyosin (HMM) is a truncated double-headed myosin molecule that is soluble at physiological ionic strength. Subfragments of myosin containing two heads retain phosphorylation dependent regulation but single headed subfragments do not and are always “In”(Cremo et al., 1995; Trybus et al., 1997) thereby implicating head-head interactions as a fundamental feature of regulation. We have used a positively charged lipid monolayer to obtain 2-D crystalline arrays of both the unphosphorylated, inactive form (I-form) and thiophosphorylated, activated form (P-form) from chicken gizzard smooth muscle HMM obtained from a Baculovirus expression system. A comparison of averaged 2-D projections of both forms in negative stain at 2.3 nm resolution reveals distinct structural differences (Wendt et al., 1999). The two crystals have p2 symmetry but vastly different unit cell dimensions.