UC Berkeley

Soluble guanylate cyclase (sGC) is the primary nitric oxide (NO) receptor in higher eukaryotes, including humans. NO-dependent signaling via sGC is associated with important physiological effects in the vascular, pulmonary, and neurological systems, and sGC itself is an established drug target for the treatment of pulmonary hypertension due to its central role in vasodilation. Despite isolation in the late 1970s, high-resolution structural information on full-length sGC remained elusive until recent cryo-electron microscopy structures were determined of the protein in both the basal unactivated state and the NO-activated state. These structures revealed large-scale conformational changes upon activation that appear to be centered on rearrangements within the coiled-coil (CC) domains in the enzyme. Here, a structure-guided approach was used to engineer constitutively unactivated and constitutively activated sGC variants through mutagenesis of the CC domains. These results demonstrate that the activation-induced conformational change in the CC domains is necessary and sufficient for determining the level of sGC activity.