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Originally published in Science Express on 30 October 2008
Science 28 November 2008:
Vol. 322. no. 5906, pp. 1369 - 1373
DOI: 10.1126/science.1165886

Reports

Structural Evidence for Common Ancestry of the Nuclear Pore Complex and Vesicle Coats

Stephen G. Brohawn,1* Nina C. Leksa,1* Eric D. Spear,1 Kanagalaghatta R. Rajashankar,2 Thomas U. Schwartz1{dagger}

Nuclear pore complexes (NPCs) facilitate nucleocytoplasmic transport. These massive assemblies comprise an eightfold symmetric scaffold of architectural proteins and central-channel phenylalanine-glycine-repeat proteins forming the transport barrier. We determined the nucleoporin 85 (Nup85)bulletSeh1 structure, a module in the heptameric Nup84 complex, at 3.5 angstroms resolution. Structural, biochemical, and genetic analyses position the Nup84 complex in two peripheral NPC rings. We establish a conserved tripartite element, the ancestral coatomer element ACE1, that reoccurs in several nucleoporins and vesicle coat proteins, providing structural evidence of coevolution from a common ancestor. We identified interactions that define the organization of the Nup84 complex on the basis of comparison with vesicle coats and confirmed the sites by mutagenesis. We propose that the NPC scaffold, like vesicle coats, is composed of polygons with vertices and edges forming a membrane-proximal lattice that provides docking sites for additional nucleoporins.

1 Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
2 Northeastern Collaborative Access Team, Building 436, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL 60439, USA.

* These authors contributed equally to this work.

{dagger} To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: tus{at}mit.edu

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Role of the Ndc1 interaction network in yeast nuclear pore complex assembly and maintenance.
E. Onischenko, L. H. Stanton, A. S. Madrid, T. Kieselbach, and K. Weis (2009)
J. Cell Biol. 185, 475-491
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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)