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Use of Thioredoxin as a Reporter To Identify a Subset of Escherichia coli Signal Sequences That Promote Signal Recognition Particle-Dependent Translocation

Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115,¹ Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520,² Institute for Biochemistry, Free University Berlin, 14195 Berlin, Germany³

Received 19 November 2004/ Accepted 20 January 2005

We have previously reported that the DsbA signal sequence promotes efficient, cotranslational translocation of the cytoplasmic protein thioredoxin-1 via the bacterial signal recognition particle (SRP) pathway. However, two commonly used signal sequences, those of PhoA and MalE, which promote export by a posttranslational mechanism, do not export thioredoxin. We proposed that this difference in efficiency of export was due to the rapid folding of thioredoxin in the cytoplasm; cotranslational export by the DsbA signal sequence avoids the problem of cytoplasmic folding (C. F. Schierle, M. Berkmen, D. Huber, C. Kumamoto, D. Boyd, and J. Beckwith, J. Bacteriol. 185:5706-5713, 2003). Here, we use thioredoxin as a reporter to distinguish SRP-dependent from non-SRP-dependent cleavable signal sequences. We screened signal sequences exhibiting a range of hydrophobicity values based on a method that estimates hydrophobicity. Successive iterations of screening and refining the method defined a threshold hydrophobicity required for SRP recognition. While all of the SRP-dependent signal sequences identified were above this threshold, there were also a few signal sequences above the threshold that did not utilize the SRP pathway. These results suggest that a simple measure of the hydrophobicity of a signal sequence is an important but not a sufficient indicator for SRP recognition. In addition, by fusing a number of both classes of signal sequences to DsbA, we found that DsbA utilizes an SRP-dependent signal sequence to achieve efficient export to the periplasm. Our results suggest that those proteins found to be exported by SRP-dependent signal sequences may require this mode of export because of their tendency to fold rapidly in the cytoplasm.

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