Extracellular domains drive homo- but not hetero-dimerization of erbB receptors

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Oxford University Press

RESUMO

Many different growth factor ligands, including epidermal growth factor (EGF) and the neuregulins (NRGs), regulate members of the erbB/HER family of receptor tyrosine kinases. These growth factors induce erbB receptor oligomerization, and their biological specificity is thought to be defined by the combination of homo- and hetero-oligomers that they stabilize upon binding. One model proposed for ligand-induced erbB receptor hetero-oligomerization involves simple heterodimerization; another suggests that higher order hetero-oligomers are ‘nucleated’ by ligand-induced homodimers. To distinguish between these possibilities, we compared the abilities of EGF and NRG1-β1 to induce homo- and hetero-oligomerization of purified erbB receptor extracellular domains. EGF and NRG1-β1 induced efficient homo-oligomerization of the erbB1 and erbB4 extracellular domains, respectively. In contrast, ligand-induced erbB receptor extracellular domain hetero-oligomers did not form (except for s-erbB2–s-erbB4 hetero-oligomers). Our findings argue that erbB receptor extracellular domains do not recapitulate most heteromeric interactions of the erbB receptors, yet reproduce their ligand-induced homo-oligomerization properties very well. This suggests that mechanisms for homo- and hetero-oligomerization of erbB receptors are different, and contradicts the simple heterodimerization hypothesis prevailing in the literature.

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