Structure Reveals Homology in Elevator Transporters

The elevator transport mechanism is one of the handful of canonical mechanisms by which transporters shuttle their substrates across the semi-permeable membranes that surround cells and organelles. Studies of molecular function are naturally guided by evolutionary context, but until now this context has been limited for elevator transporters because established evolutionary classification methods have organized them into several apparently unrelated families. Through comprehensive examination of the pertinent structures available in the Protein Data Bank, we show that 62 elevator transporters from 18 families share a conserved architecture in their transport domains consisting of 10 helices connected in 8 topologies. Through quantitative analysis of the structural similarity, structural complexity, and topologically-corrected sequence similarity among the transport domains, we provide compelling evidence that these elevator transporters are all homologous. Using our analysis, we have constructed a phylogenetic tree to enable quantification and visualization of the evolutionary relationships among elevator transporters and their families. We also report several examples of functional features that are shared by elevator transporters from different families. Our findings shed new light on the elevator transport mechanism and allow us to understand it in a far deeper and more nuanced manner.