SUMMARY Composed of up to 1000 phospho-anhydride bond-linked phosphate monomers, inorganic polyphosphate (polyP) is one of the most ancient, conserved, and enigmatic molecules in biology. Here we demonstrate that polyP functions as a hitherto unrecognized chaperone. We show that polyP stabilizes proteins in vivo, diminishes the need for other chaperone systems to survive proteotoxic stress conditions, and protects a wide variety of proteins against stress-induced unfolding and aggregation. In vitro studies reveal that polyP has protein-like chaperone qualities, binds to unfolding proteins with high affinity in an ATP-independent manner, and supports their productive refolding once non-stress conditions are restored. Our results uncover a universally important function for polyP and suggest that these long chains of inorganic phosphate may have served as one of nature’s first chaperones, a role that continues to the present day.

Maintenance of the cellular redox balance is crucial for cell survival. An increase in reactive oxygen, nitrogen, or chlorine species can lead to oxidative stress conditions, potentially damaging DNA, lipids, and proteins. Proteins are very sensitive to oxidative modifications, particularly methionine and cysteine residues. The reversibility of some of these oxidative protein modifications makes them ideally suited to take on regulatory roles in protein function. This is especially true for disulfide bond formation, which has the potential to mediate extensive yet fully reversible structural and functional changes, rapidly adjusting the protein's activity to the prevailing oxidant levels.

SUMMARY Polyphosphate (polyP), a several billion year old biopolymer, is produced in every cell, tissue, and organism studied. Structurally extremely simple, polyP consists of long chains of covalently linked inorganic phosphate groups. We report here the surprising discovery that polyP shows a remarkable efficacy in accelerating amyloid fibril formation. We found that polyP serves as an effective nucleation source for various different amyloid proteins, ranging from bacterial CsgA to human α-Synuclein, Aβ1-40/42 and Tau. PolyP-associated α-Synuclein fibrils show distinct differences in seeding behavior, morphology and fibril stability compared to fibrils formed in the absence of polyP. In vivo, the amyloid-stimulating and fibril-stabilizing effects of polyP have wide-reaching consequences, increasing the rate of biofilm formation in pathogenic bacteria and mitigating amyloid toxicity in differentiated neuroblastoma cells and C. elegans strains that serve as models for human folding diseases. These results suggest that we have discovered a conserved cytoprotective modifier of amyloidogenic processes.

SUMMARY The redox-regulated chaperone Hsp33 protects organisms against oxidative stress that leads to protein unfolding. Activation of Hsp33 is triggered by the oxidative unfolding of its own redox-sensor domain, making Hsp33 a member of a recently discovered class of chaperones that require partial unfolding for full chaperone activity. Here we address the long-standing question of how chaperones recognize client proteins. We show that Hsp33 uses its own intrinsically disordered regions to discriminate between unfolded and partially structured folding intermediates. Binding to secondary structure elements in client proteins stabilizes Hsp33’s intrinsically disordered regions, and this stabilization appears to mediate Hsp33’s high affinity for structured folding intermediates. Return to nonstress conditions reduces Hsp33’s disulfide bonds, which then significantly destabilizes the bound client proteins and in doing so converts them into less-structured, folding-competent client proteins of ATP-dependent foldases. We propose a model in which energy-independent chaperones use internal order-to-disorder transitions to control substrate binding and release.

Significance Bile salts are extremely abundant molecules in the mammalian intestine and play important roles in food digestion. Much less well known is the fact that bile salts are also highly antimicrobial and control bacterial growth in the gut. Here, we report the discovery that bile salts affect bacterial growth by causing widespread unfolding and aggregation of cytosolic proteins in bacteria, while simultaneously triggering a prooxidizing shift in the cellular ratio of reduced to oxidized glutathione. Our studies therefore reveal an important and unrealized property of a set of compounds long known to be important in human physiology, demonstrate how bacteria such as Escherichia coli defend themselves against bile salts, and uncover perhaps the first physiological condition that causes disulfide stress in vivo.