The Structure of the UbcH8−Ubiquitin Complex Shows a Unique Ubiquitin Interaction Site
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis utilizes a series of three key enzymes (E1, E2, and E3) to transfer and then covalently modify a substrate with ubiquitin. E2 conjugating enzymes are central proteins in this pathway responsible for the acceptance of a ubiquitin from the E1 enzyme and association with an E3 protein. All E2 enzymes covalently bind ubiquitin through a thiolester linkage between a conserved active-site cysteine on E2 and the C-terminal glycine on ubiquitin. It is not known whether E2 enzymes utilize similar surfaces and residues to coordinate a ubiquitin molecule and how this might contribute to any substrate specificity. In this work, we determined the structure of the human E2 enzyme UbcH8 (UBE2L6) covalently bound to ubiquitin by NMR spectroscopy. A disulfide bond mimicking the short-lived thiolester was formed between the two proteins providing a stable complex. Overall, the structure of UbcH8 does not undergo a significant conformational change upon forming a complex with ubiquitin. Chemical shift perturbation and cross-saturation experiments were used to identify contacts between UbcH8 and ubiquitin and those contacts used as inputs for HADDOCK molecular docking to produce the structure of the UbcH8-ubiquitin complex. An ensemble of 16 structures (root-mean-square deviation of 0.83 A) showed that ubiquitin interacts with the linker region prior to the alpha5 helix as well as residues near the catalytic site. This region corresponds to an area of negative potential on the UbcH8 surface and is considerably different from other E2-ubiquitin interaction sites. Our findings indicate the positioning of ubiquitin on UbcH8 would still allow interaction with E1 and E3 enzymes. Together, the results suggest the UbcH8-ubiquitin complex may provide an additional level of specificity in the ubiquitination pathway.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".