Structural and molecular comparison of bacterial and eukaryotic trigger factors

A considerably small fraction of approximately 60–100 proteins of all chloroplast proteins are encoded by the plastid genome. Many of these proteins are major subunits of complexes with central functions within plastids. In comparison with other subcellular compartments and bacteria, many steps of chloroplast protein biogenesis are not well understood. We report here on the first study of chloroplast-localised trigger factor. In bacteria, this molecular chaperone is known to associate with translating ribosomes to facilitate the folding of newly synthesized proteins. Chloroplast trigger factors of the unicellular green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and the vascular land plant Arabidopsis thaliana were characterized by biophysical and structural methods and compared to the Escherichia coli isoform. We show that chloroplast trigger factor is mainly monomeric and displays only moderate stability against thermal unfolding even under mild heat-stress conditions. The global shape and conformation of these proteins were determined in solution by small-angle X-ray scattering and subsequent ab initio modelling. As observed for bacteria, plastidic trigger factors have a dragon-like structure, albeit with slightly altered domain arrangement and flexibility. This structural conservation despite low amino acid sequence homology illustrates a remarkable evolutionary robustness of chaperone conformations across various kingdoms of life.