Targeting the Allosteric Pathway That Interconnects the Core-Functional Scaffold and the Distal Phosphorylation Sites for Specific Dephosphorylation of Bcl-2.

Protein phosphorylation is the most significant post-translational modification for regulating cellular activities, but site-specific modulation of phosphorylation is still challenging. Using three-dimensional NMR spectra, molecular dynamics simulations, and alanine mutations, we identified that the interaction network between pT69/pS70 and R106/R109 residues prevents the phosphorylation sites from exposure to phosphatase and subsequent dephosphorylation. A Bcl-2-dephosphorylation probe, S1-6e, was designed by installing a carboxylic acid group to a Bcl-2 inhibitor. The carboxyl group competitively disrupts the interaction network between R106/R109 and pT69/pS70 and subsequently facilitates Bcl-2 dephosphorylation in living cells. As a result, S1-6e manifests a more effective apoptosis induction in pBcl-2-dependent cancer cells than other inhibitors exhibiting a similar binding affinity for Bcl-2. We believe that targeting the allosteric pathways interconnecting the core-functional domain and the phosphorylation site can be a general strategy for a rational design of site-specific dephosphorylating probes, since the allosteric pathway has been discovered in a variety of proteins.

Citation

Ziqian Wang, Ting Song, Zongwei Guo, Keke Cao, Chao Chen, Yingang Feng, Hang Wang, Fangkui Yin, Sheng Zhou, Jian Dai, Zhichao Zhang. Targeting the Allosteric Pathway That Interconnects the Core-Functional Scaffold and the Distal Phosphorylation Sites for Specific Dephosphorylation of Bcl-2. Journal of medicinal chemistry. 2020 Nov 25;63(22):13733-13744

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PMID: 33197310

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