Role of cysteine amino acid residues in calnexin.

Calnexin is an endoplasmic reticulum protein that has a role in folding newly synthesized glycoproteins. In this study, we used site-specific mutagenesis to disrupt cysteine and histidine amino acid residues in the N- and P-domains of calnexin and determined whether these mutations impact the structure and function of calnexin. We identified that disruption of the N-domain cysteines resulted in significant loss of the chaperone activity of calnexin toward the glycosylated substrate, IgY, while disruption of the P-domain cysteines only had a small impact toward IgY. We observed that wild-type calnexin as well as the P-domain double cysteine mutant contained an intramolecular disulfide bond which is lost when the N-domain cysteines are mutated. Mutation to the N-domain histidine and N-domain cysteines resulted in increased binding of ERp57. Mutations to the P-domain cysteines further enhanced ERp57 binding to calnexin. Taken together, these observations indicated that the cysteine residues within calnexin were important for the structure and function of calnexin.