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Life Sciences

J. A. Aquilina

Structure

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Effects Of Glycosylation On The Structure And Function Of The Extracellular Chaperone Clusterin, Elise Stewart, Andrew Aquilina, Simon B Easterbrook-Smith, D Murphy-Durland, C Jacobsen, S Moestrup, Mark Wilson Oct 2012

Effects Of Glycosylation On The Structure And Function Of The Extracellular Chaperone Clusterin, Elise Stewart, Andrew Aquilina, Simon B Easterbrook-Smith, D Murphy-Durland, C Jacobsen, S Moestrup, Mark Wilson

J. A. Aquilina

Clusterin is the first well characterized, constitutively secreted extracellular chaperone that binds to exposed regions of hydrophobicity on non-native proteins. It may help control the folding state of extracellular proteins by targeting them for receptor-mediated endocytosis and intracellular lysosomal degradation. A notable feature of secreted clusterin is its heavy glycosylation. Although carbohydrate comprises approximately 20−25% of the total mass of the mature molecule, its function is unknown. Results from the current study demonstrate that deglycosylation of human serum clusterin had little effect on its overall secondary structure content but produced a small increase in solvent-exposed hydrophobicity and enhanced the propensity …


Evidence For Specific Subunit Distribution And Interactions In The Quaternary Structure Of Α-Crystallin, Amie M. Morris, J Andrew Aquilina Jul 2012

Evidence For Specific Subunit Distribution And Interactions In The Quaternary Structure Of Α-Crystallin, Amie M. Morris, J Andrew Aquilina

J. A. Aquilina

The quaternary structure of alpha-crystallin is dynamic, a property which has thwarted crystallographic efforts towards structural characterization. In this study, we have used collision-induced dissociation mass spectrometry to examine the architecture of the polydisperse assemblies of alpha-crystallin. For total alpha-crystallin isolated directly from fetal calf lens using size-based chromatography, the alpha B-crystallin subunit was found to be preferentially dissociated from the oligomers, despite being significantly less abundant overall than the alpha A-crystallin subunits. Furthermore, upon mixing molar equivalents of purified alpha A- and alpha B-crystallin, the levels of their dissociation were found to decrease and increase, respectively, with time. Interestingly …