A molecular basis for the inhibition of brain protein phosphatase 2A (PP2A) activity by oxidative stress was examined in a high-speed supernatant (HSS) fraction from rat cerebral cortex. PP2A activity was subject to substantial disulfide reducing agent-reversible inhibition in the HSS fraction. Results of gel electrophoresis support the conclusions that inhibition of PP2A activity was associated with the both the disulfide cross-linking of the catalytic subunit (PP2A(C)) of the enzyme to other brain proteins and with the formation of an apparent novel intramolecular disulfide bond in PP2A(C). Additional findings that the vicinal dithiol cross-linking reagent phenylarsine oxide (PAO) produced a potent dithiothreitol-reversible inhibition of PP2A activity suggest that the cross-linking of PP2A(C) vicinal thiols to form an intramolecular disulfide bond may be sufficient to inhibit PP2A activity under oxidative stress. We propose that the dithiol-disulfide equilibrium of a vicinal thiol pair of PP2A(C) may confer redox sensitivity on cellular PP2A.
Reversible oxidation on proteins of vicinal thiols to form intraprotein disulfides is believed to be an important means by which redox sensitivity is conferred on cellular signaling and metabolism. Affinity chromatography using immobilized phenylarsine oxide (PAO), which binds preferentially to vicinal thiols over monothiols, has been used in very limited studies to isolate the fraction of cellular proteins that exhibit reversible oxidation of vicinal thiols to presumed disulfide bonds. A challenge to the use of PAO-affinity chromatography for isolation of readily oxidizable vicinal thiol proteins (VTPs) has been the lack of a disulfide reducing agent that reverses oxidation of the PAO-binding protein thiols and maintains these in the reduced state necessary to bind PAO but does not also compete with the VTPs for binding to the immobilized PAO. The present study demonstrates that the capture from a detergent-soluble rat brain extract of VTPs by PAO-affinity chromatography was improved greatly by use of the reducing agent tris(2-carboxyethyl)-phosphine which, unlike more traditional disulfide-reducing agents, does not contain a thiol group. Moreover, we show that, while a substantial fraction of total brain proteins contain PAO-binding thiols, only a fraction of these were readily and reversibly oxidized. The two most abundant of these redox-active proteins were identified as albumin and triose phosphate isomerase (TPI). We propose that TPI is a candidate intracellular redox receptor protein. The improved PAO-affinity method detailed here should enable the discovery of lower abundance novel redox-active regulatory proteins.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.