Von-Hippel Lindau protein amyloid formation. The role of GST-tag

In the last decade, much attention was given to the study of physiological amyloid fibrils. These structures include A-bodies, which are the nucleolar fibrillar formations that appear in the response to acidosis and heat shock, and disassemble after the end of stress. One of the proteins involved in the biogenesis of A-bodies, regardless of the type of stress, is Von-Hippel Lindau protein (VHL). Known also as a tumor suppressor, VHL is capable to form amyloid fibrils both in vitro and in vivo in response to the environment acidification. As with most amyloidogenic proteins fusion with various tags is used to increase the solubility of VHL. Here, we first performed AFM-study of fibrils formed by VHL protein and by VHL fused with GST-tag (GST-VHL) at acidic conditions. It was shown that formed by full-length VHL fibrils are short heterogenic structures with persistent length of 2400 nm and average contour length of 409 nm. GST-tag catalyzes VHL amyloid fibril formation, superimpose chirality, increases length and level of hierarchy, but decreases rigidity of amyloid fibrils. The obtained data indicate that tagging can significantly affect the fibrillogenesis of the target protein.