2.A.17 The Proton-dependent Oligopeptide Transporter (POT) Family

Proteins of the POT family (also called the PTR (peptide transport) family) consist of proteins from animals, plants, yeast, archaea and both Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria. Several of these organisms possess multiple POT family paralogues. The proteins are of about 450-600 amino acyl residues in length with the eukaryotic proteins in general being longer than the bacterial proteins. They exhibit 12 putative or established transmembrane α-helical spanners. Some members of the POT family exhibit limited sequence similarity to protein members of the major facilitator superfamily (MFS; TC #2.A.1). Thus the POT family is a family within the MFS.

While most members of the POT family catalyze peptide transport, one is a nitrate permease and one can transport histidine as well as peptides. A nitrate permease of Arabidopsis, Chl1 (TC #2.A.17.3.1), exhibits dual affinity. When phosphorylated at threonine-101, it exhibits high affinity (50 μM) for nitrate, but when not phosphorylated, it exhibits low affinity (~5 mM) (Liu and Tsay, 2003). Some of the peptide transporters can also transport antibiotics. They function by proton symport, but the substrate:H⁺ stoichiometry is variable: the high affinity rat PepT2 carrier catalyzes uptake of 2 and 3H⁺ with neutral and anionic dipeptides, respectively, while the low affinity PepT1 carrier catalyzes uptake of one H⁺ per neutral peptide. In eukaryotes, some of these transporters may be in organellar membranes such as the lysosomes.

Di- and tripeptide transporters of the POT/PTR/NRT1 family are localized either to the tonoplast (TP) or plasma membrane (PM). A 7 amino acid fragment of the hydrophilic N-terminal region of Arabidopsis PTR2, PTR4 and PTR6 is required for TP localization and sufficient to redirect not only PM-localized PTR1 or PTR5, but also sucrose transporter SUC2 to the tonopolast (Komarova et al., 2012). L(11) and I(12) of PTR2 are essential for TP targeting, while only one acidic amino acid at position 5, 6 or 7 is required, revealing a dileucine (LL or LI) motif with at least one upstream acidic residue. Similar dileucine motifs could be identified in other plant TP transporters. Targeting to the PM required the loop between transmembrane domains 6 and 7 of PTR1 or PTR5. Deletion of either PM or TP targeting signals resulted in retention in internal membranes, indicating that PTR trafficking to these destination membranes requires distinct signals and is in both cases not by default (Komarova et al., 2012).

The generalized transport reaction catalyzed by the proteins of the POT family is:

substrate (out) + nH+ (out) → substrate (in) + nH⁺ (in).