2. Academic Validation
  3. Mitochondrial COQ9 is a lipid-binding protein that associates with COQ7 to enable coenzyme Q biosynthesis

Mitochondrial COQ9 is a lipid-binding protein that associates with COQ7 to enable coenzyme Q biosynthesis

  • Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Nov 4;111(44):E4697-705. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1413128111.
Danielle C Lohman 1,  Farhad Forouhar 2,  Emily T Beebe 3,  Matthew S Stefely 1,  Catherine E Minogue 4,  Arne Ulbrich 4,  Jonathan A Stefely 1,  Shravan Sukumar 1,  Marta Luna-Sánchez 5,  Adam Jochem 1,  Scott Lew 2,  Jayaraman Seetharaman 2,  Rong Xiao 6,  Huang Wang 6,  Michael S Westphall 7,  Russell L Wrobel 3,  John K Everett 6,  Julie C Mitchell 8,  Luis C López 5,  Joshua J Coon 9,  Liang Tong 10,  David J Pagliarini 11
Affiliations

Affiliations

  • 1 Departments of Biochemistry.
  • 2 Department of Biological Sciences, Northeast Structural Genomics Consortium, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027;
  • 3 Mitochondrial Protein Partnership, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706;
  • 4 Chemistry.
  • 5 Instituto de Biotecnología, Centro de Investigación Biomédica, Parque Tecnológico de Ciencias de la Salud, Armilla, Granada, Spain; Departamento de Fisiología, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain;
  • 6 Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine and Department of Molecular Biology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ 08854; and.
  • 7 Genome Center of Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706.
  • 8 Departments of Biochemistry, Mathematics, and.
  • 9 Chemistry, Genome Center of Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706 Biomolecular Chemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706;
  • 10 Department of Biological Sciences, Northeast Structural Genomics Consortium, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027; [email protected] [email protected].
  • 11 Departments of Biochemistry, Mitochondrial Protein Partnership, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706; [email protected] [email protected].
PMID: 25339443 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1413128111
Abstract

Coenzyme Q (CoQ) is an isoprenylated quinone that is essential for cellular respiration and is synthesized in mitochondria by the combined action of at least nine proteins (COQ1-9). Although most COQ proteins are known to catalyze modifications to CoQ precursors, the biochemical role of COQ9 remains unclear. Here, we report that a disease-related COQ9 mutation leads to extensive disruption of the CoQ protein biosynthetic complex in a mouse model, and that COQ9 specifically interacts with COQ7 through a series of conserved residues. Toward understanding how COQ9 can perform these functions, we solved the crystal structure of Homo sapiens COQ9 at 2.4 Å. Unexpectedly, our structure reveals that COQ9 has structural homology to the TFR family of Bacterial transcriptional regulators, but that it adopts an atypical TFR dimer orientation and is not predicted to bind DNA. Our structure also reveals a lipid-binding site, and mass spectrometry-based analyses of purified COQ9 demonstrate that it associates with multiple lipid species, including CoQ itself. The conserved COQ9 residues necessary for its interaction with COQ7 comprise a surface patch around the lipid-binding site, suggesting that COQ9 might serve to present its bound lipid to COQ7. Collectively, our data define COQ9 as the first, to our knowledge, mammalian TFR structural homolog and suggest that its lipid-binding capacity and association with COQ7 are key features for enabling CoQ biosynthesis.

Keywords

COQ7; COQ9; TFR family; coenzyme Q; ubiquinone.

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