Stability and melting kinetics of structural domains in the myosin rod.

The thermal stability and melting kinetics of the alpha-helical conformation within several regions of the rabbit myosin rod have been investigated. Cyanogen bromide cleavage of long myosin subfragment-2 produced one coiled-coil alpha-helical fragment corresponding to short subfragment-2 with molecular weight 90,000 (Mr = 45,000) and two fragments from the hinge region with molecular weights of 32,000 to 34,000 (Mr = 16,000 to 17,000) and 24,000 to 26,000 (Mr = 12,000 to 13,000). Optical rotation melting experiments and temperature-jump kinetic studies of long subfragment-2 and its cyanogen bromide fragments show that the hinge and the short subfragment-2 domains melt as quasi-independent co-operative units. The alpha-helical structure within the hinge has an appreciably lower thermal stability than the flanking short subfragment-2 and light meromyosin regions of the myosin rod. Two relaxation processes for helix-melting, one in the submillisecond range (tau f) and the other in the millisecond range (tau s), are observed in the light meromyosin and short subfragment-2 regions of the rod, but melting in the hinge domain is dominated by the fast (tau f) process. Results suggest that the hinge domain of the subfragment-2 link may be the locus of force generation in a cycling cross-bridge.