Site-to-site interdomain communication may mediate different loss-of-function mechanisms in a cancer-associated NQO1 polymorphism

Encarnación Medina-Carmona, Jose L. Neira, Eduardo Salido, Julian E. Fuchs, Rogelio J. Palomino-Morales, David Timson, Angel L. Pey

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Disease associated genetic variations often cause intracellular enzyme inactivation, dysregulationand instability. However, allosteric communication of mutational effects to distant functional sites leading to loss-of-function remains poorly understood. We characterize here interdomain site-to-site communication by which a common cancer-associated single nucleotide polymorphism (c.C609T/p. P187S) reduces the activity and stability in vivo of NAD(P)H:quinone oxidoreductase 1 (NQO1). NQO1 is a FAD-dependent, two-domain multifunctional stress protein acting as a Phase II enzyme, activating cancer pro-drugs and stabilizing p53 and p73α oncosuppressors. We show that p.P187S causes structural and dynamic changes communicated to functional sites far from the mutated site, affecting the FAD binding site located at the N-terminal domain (NTD) and accelerating proteasomal degradation through dynamic effects on the C-terminal domain (CTD). Structural protein:protein interactionstudies reveal that the cancer-associated polymorphism does not abolish the interaction with p73α, indicating that oncosuppressor destabilization largely mirrors the low intracellular stability of p.P187S. In conclusion, we show how a single disease associated amino acid change may allosterically perturb several functional sites in an oligomeric and multidomain protein. These results have important implications for the understanding of loss-of-function genetic diseases and the identification of novelstructural hot spots as targets for pharmacological intervention.
Original languageEnglish
JournalScientific Reports
Volume7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 14 Mar 2017

Bibliographical note

© The Author(s) 2017. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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