Biochemical analysis of human IQGAP proteins

In your cells there is a network of proteins called the cytoskeleton. This isn't a very good name because unlike your bones it is constantly being taken apart, put back together and moved around. Its job is to provide support for the cell, to provide tracks for things to move about in the cell on and to help the cell move around. All these activities need to be co-ordinated and if this goes wrong you'll get ill. You might even get cancer. One of the most interesting recent discoveries is that there are a group of proteins whose job it is to help organise the cytoskeleton. These organising proteins (called scaffolding proteins) do more than just bring the right proteins together at the right time. They also talk to other proteins by sticking to them. When two proteins stick to each other messages can be passed between them because of the different shapes the molecules can adopt. So we think these scaffolding proteins listen to what other proteins have to say, work out what it all means and then pass the right message on to the cytoskeleton. You can think of them being like miniature telephone exchanges. We want to know how they work. The particular scaffolding proteins we are interested in are called the IQGAP proteins. In your body you have three different types of IQGAP protein called IQGAP1, IQGAP2 and IQGAP3. Don't worry / the name IQGAP doesn't mean that you're stupid because you have a gap in your IQ. It's actually named after two parts of the protein / the IQ-motifs and the GAP domain. These are two of the bits of the protein which stick to other proteins. The IQ-motifs stick to a protein called calmodulin and the GAP domain to one called CDC42. Both calmodulin and CDC42 are proteins which carry messages round the cell. There's another bit we're interested in called the CHD which sticks to actin. Actin is a protein in the cytoskeleton. So we think IQGAPs collect information from calmodulin and CDC42 and pass it on to actin. We want to find out how they do that. What we're going do is to genetically engineer some bacteria so that they'll make calmodulin and CDC42 for us. IQGAPs are a bit big to do this with and so we'll make fragments of them. Luckily for us, other scientists have already worked out some fragments which bacteria are happy to make. We've also got a problem with actin. Other people have shown that when bacteria make this protein it doesn't work properly. So we'll make that one in yeast instead. Once we've got all these proteins we'll ask how they stick together. We'll try and find out the chemical details of what's going on at the places where the proteins stick together. Of course proteins are very very small and so we can't just look at them. We can't even look at them under a microscope. So we have to use indirect methods using chemistry and physics to find out what's going on. We're also going to find out how tightly they stick / again using chemical and physical methods. Another thing we're very interested in is how IQGAP1, IQGAP2 and IQGAP3 differ from each other. We know that they are quite similar, but we also know that IQGAP1 and IQGAP2 are found in different cells and stick to a slightly different range of other proteins. As for IQGAP3 we really don't know anything about that yet. So anything we discover about it really will be novel. We think that the way each IQGAP sticks to these other proteins will be slightly different and that how strongly they stick will also be different. Hopefully once we know the chemical details about how they stick, we'll also have a good idea about why the strength of stickiness is different. This project is important because the cytoskeleton goes wrong in a lot of diseases and some drugs interact with the cytoskeleton. When we've finished we'll be a bit closer to understanding how these tiny molecular telephone exchanges actually work.

This project will begin the process of understanding the biochemical details of how a key group of cytoskeletal scaffolding proteins, the human IQGAPs, work at a molecular level. This will be tackled by initiating in vitro studies of the three human IQGAP proteins (IQGAP1, IQGAP2 and IQGAP3) using a compare and contrast approach. Fragments of these proteins along with four key partners (calmodulin, myosin essential light chain, actin and CDC42) will be expressed in yeast or bacteria and purified to homogeneity. The interfaces between the IQGAPs and their binding partners will be mapped using chemical cross-linking and protease protection. The stoichiometries of binding will be determined by analytical gel filtration and the affinities by surface plasmon resonance (BIAcore) analysis.