Theoretical Studies on Competitive Binding of Caldesmon and Myosin S1 to Actin: Prediction of Apparent Cooperativity in Equilibrium and Slow-Down in Kinetics of S1 Binding by Caldesmon

Several laboratories have reported cooperative binding of S1 to actin in the presence of caldesmon. This cooperative binding has been interpreted with a model similar to that proposed for the binding of S1 to regulated actins in which the binding affinity of S1 is controlled by the position of the tropomyosin filaments. In a recent paper [Sen, A., Chen, Y., Yan, B., and Chalovich, J. M. (2001) Biochemistry 40, 5757-64], we showed qualitatively that S1 binding resulted in rapid dissociation of caldesmon from actin or actin-tropomyosin. This suggests that the cooperativity observed in the case of caldesmon is not due to a conformational change in actin-caldesmon but to the displacement of caldesmon. We show in this paper that the pure competitive binding model, in which both S1 and caldesmon are competing for the same binding sites on actin, can simulate quantitatively the effect of caldesmon on both the equilibrium and the kinetics of S1 binding to actin. This model successfully predicts an apparent cooperativity for the binding of S1 to actin-caldesmon without the need to assume multiple actin-caldesmon structures and produces a decreased rate of S1 binding to actin in the presence of caldesmon. This suggests that the inhibitory action of caldesmon on the actin-activated ATPase activity of myosin in solution and on the generation of active force in a contracting muscle may be simply due to the blocking of myosin binding sites on actin by caldesmon.