Vimentin single cysteine residue acts as a tunable sensor for network organization and as a key for actin remodeling in response to oxidants and electrophiles

Cysteine residues can undergo multiple posttranslational modifications with diverse functional consequences, potentially behaving as tunable sensors. The intermediate filament protein vimentin has important implications in pathophysiology, including cancer progression, infection, and fibrosis, and maintains a close interplay with other cytoskeletal structures, such as actin filaments and microtubules. We previously showed that the single vimentin cysteine, C328, is a key target for oxidants and electrophiles. Here, we demonstrate that structurally diverse cysteine-reactive agents, including electrophilic mediators, oxidants and drug-related compounds, disrupt the vimentin network eliciting morphologically distinct reorganizations. As most of these agents display broad reactivity, we pinpointed the importance of C328 by confirming that local perturbations introduced through mutagenesis provoke structure-dependent vimentin rearrangements. Thus, GFP-vimentin wild type (wt) forms squiggles and short filaments in vimentin-deficient cells, the C328F, C328W, and C328H mutants generate diverse filamentous assemblies, and the C328A and C328D constructs fail to elongate yielding dots. Remarkably, vimentin C328H structures resemble the wt, but are strongly resistant to electrophile-elicited disruption. Therefore, the C328H mutant allows elucidating whether cysteine-dependent vimentin reorganization influences other cellular responses to reactive agents. Electrophiles such as 1,4-dinitro-1H-imidazole and 4-hydroxynonenal induce robust actin stress fibers in cells expressing vimentin wt. Strikingly, under these conditions, vimentin C328H expression blunts electrophile-elicited stress fiber formation, apparently acting upstream of RhoA. Analysis of additional vimentin C328 mutants shows that electrophile-sensitive and assembly-defective vimentin variants permit induction of stress fibers by reactive species, whereas electrophile-resistant filamentous vimentin structures prevent it. Together, our results suggest that vimentin acts as a break for actin stress fibers formation, which would be released by C328-aided disruption, thus allowing full actin remodeling in response to oxidants and electrophiles. These observations postulate C328 as a “sensor” transducing structurally diverse modifications into fine-tuned vimentin network rearrangements, and a gatekeeper for certain electrophiles in the interplay with actin.