Physical-chemical properties of ubiquitin

The secondary structure of ubiquitin, the environment of its single tyrosine residue and its potential for interacting noncovalently with histone 2A or DNA, have been probed by circular dichroism (CD), ultraviolet absorbance, fluorescence and ancillary techniques. The results indicate that ubiquitin has a stable secondary structure containing only a low percentage of alpha-helix or beta-sheet. The ubiquitin tyrosine has an elevated pKa arising from the influence of a spatially proximate carboxylate which also causes a marked quenching of the tyrosine fluorescence at neutral pH; the influence of this carboxylate is lost when the protein is unfolded in 7 M guanidine. No evidence has been obtained for the presence of allosteric noncovalent interactions between free ubiquitin and either histone 2A or purified unfractionated DNA. The results suggest that one function of ubiquitin (or of the ubiquitin segment of protein A24) may be to interact with a chromatin component other than histone 2A or DNA, and/or that ubiquitin functions within 2A as a steric blocking group of a region of the nucleosome.