HUVEC were incubated with mixtures of 50 μg/mL WT FI or mutants and C3b/125I-C3b see more at 37°C. As positive control 20 μg/mL FH was added and in the negative control FI was omitted. The presence of cleavage products of C3b degradation was assessed by gradient SDS-PAGE (Fig. 7A). The intensity of the 68-kDa-cleavage product was calculated and presented as mean value from three independent experiments (Fig. 7B). The results demonstrate that endogenous membrane-bound MCP acts

as cofactor for FI-mediated cleavage of C3b. D501N mutant did not cleave C3b α′-chain, while P32A and A222G cleaved C3b as efficiently as the WT FI. In the presence of membrane-bound MCP as cofactor M120V, H165R and R299W degraded C3b α′-chain significantly more KU-60019 datasheet efficiently than WT FI (Fig. 7B). We next tried to rationalize the functional consequences of several of the point mutations examined above in the context of the predicted three-dimensional (3D) structures of each domain of FI (Fig. 8). The homology modeling approach is described in detail in 34, although further details regarding the modeling of the FIMAC domain are given below. The models of the domains, FIMAC, CD5, LDLr1 and SP (Fig. are presented separately because at present there are no reliable experimental data to suggest

how the domains are oriented in the full-length protein. The structural and functional consequences of the mutations are listed in Table 2. The residue Cys25 is located in the FIMAC domain and forms a disulfide bond with the adjacent Cys36 (Fig. 8). A mutation to

Phe destroys this stabilizing bond and further destabilizes by introducing steric clashes with the side chain of Cys36. It is likely that the Cys25 mutation imposes structural changes within the N-terminal region of this domain, possibly explaining why a decreased secretion of this mutant is observed experimentally. The Pro32 residue is fully Oxymatrine solvent exposed in a surface loop, at least in the isolated FIMAC domain (Fig. 8). Proline usually imposes greater conformational constraints on the polypeptide backbone than other amino acids and, in places where it can be tolerated, such as in loops and turns, proline makes a positive contribution to protein stability through entropic effects. In the present situation, while this mutation could slightly destabilize the domain, it could be structurally tolerated at this position. We found that the P32A mutant expressed as well as WT FI, and showed only slightly reduced function in degrading C4b and C3b in solution and only when C4BP and FH were used as cofactors. However, the P32A mutant showed substantially impaired ability to degrade C3b deposited on cell surfaces. A proline at position 32 could perturb interdomain contacts or form new interactions with a FI ligand when C3b is part of a deposited C3-convertase. The residue Met120 is located in the CD5 domain (Fig.