Glycan specificity of a testis-specific lectin chaperone calmegin and effects of hydrophobic interactions

Background: Testis-specific chaperone calmegin is required for the generation of normal spermatozoa. Calmegin is known to be a homologue of endoplasmic reticulum (ER) residing lectin chaperone calnexin. Although functional similarity between calnexin and calmegin has been predicted, detailed information concerned with substrate recognition by calmegin, such as glycan specificity, chaperone function and binding affinity, are obscure.

Methods: In this study, biochemical properties of calmegin and calnexin were compared using synthetic glycans and glycosylated or non-glycosylated proteins as substrates.

Results: Whereas their amino acid sequences are quite similar to each other, a certain difference in secondary structures was indicated by circular dichroism (CD) spectrum. While both of them inhibited protein heat-aggregation to a similar extent, calnexin exhibited a higher ability to facilitate protein folding. Similarly to calnexin, calmegin preferentially recognizes monoglucosylated glycans such as Glc1Man9GlcNAc2 (G1M9). While the surface hydrophobicity of calmegin was higher than that of calnexin, calnexin showed stronger binding to substrate. We reasoned that lectin activity, in addition to hydrophobic interaction, contributes to this strong affinity between calnexin and substrate.

Conclusions: Although their similarity in carbohydrate binding specificities is high, there seems to be some differences in the mode of substrate recognition between calmegin and calnexin.

General significance: Properties of calmegin as a lectin-chaperone were revealed in comparison with calnexin.