Partitioning of Proteins into Plasma Membrane Microdomains
CLUSTERING OF MUTANT INFLUENZA VIRUS HEMAGGLUTININS INTO COATED PITS DEPENDS ON THE STRENGTH OF THE INTERNALIZATION SIGNAL*
- From the ‡Department of Neurobiochemistry, The George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel, the ¶Department of Chemistry, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario N6A 5B7, Canada, and the **Department of Biochemistry, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, Dallas, Texas 75235-9038
Abstract
Internalization of membrane proteins involves their recruitment into plasma membrane clathrin-coated pits, with which they are thought to interact by binding to AP-2 adaptor protein complexes. To investigate the interactions of membrane proteins with coated pits at the cell surface, we applied image correlation spectroscopy to measure directly and quantitatively the clustering of influenza hemagglutinin (HA) protein mutants carrying specific cytoplasmic internalization signals. The HA system enables direct comparison between isolated internalization signals, because HA itself is excluded from coated pits. The studies presented here provide, for the first time, a direct quantitative measure for the degree of clustering of membrane proteins in coated pits at the cell surface. The degree of clustering depended on the strength of the internalization signal and on the integrity of the clathrin lattices and correlated with the internalization rates of the mutants. The clustering of the HA mutants fully correlated with their ability to co-precipitate α-adaptin from whole cells, the first such demonstration for a membrane protein that is not a member of the epidermal growth factor receptor family. Furthermore, both the clustering in coated pits and the co-precipitation with α-adaptin were dramatically reduced in the cold, suggesting that low temperature can interfere with the sorting of proteins into coated pits. In addition to the specific results reported here, the general applicability of the image correlation spectroscopy approach to study any process involving the clustering or oligomerization of membrane receptors at the cell surface is discussed.
Footnotes
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↵* This work was supported in part by Grant 95-00009 from the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation, Jerusalem, Israel (Y. I. H.), Grant GM37547 from the National Institutes of Health (M. G. R.), and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC, Canada) research grant (N. O. P.).The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. The article must therefore be hereby marked “advertisement” in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.
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↵§ These authors contributed equally to this work.
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↵‖ Postgraduate fellow supported by NSERC.
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↵‡ To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel.: 972-3-640-9053; Fax: 972-3-640-7643; E-mail:henis{at}post.tau.ac.il.
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↵1 The abbreviations used are: AP, assembly protein; EGF, epidermal growth factor; HA, influenza virus hemagglutinin; ICS, image correlation spectroscopy; HBSS, Hanks’ balanced salt solution; Sulfo-NHS-LC-biotin, sulfosuccinimidyl-6-(biotinamido)hexanoate; FITC-GAR Fab′, fluorescein-coupled affinity purified Fab′ of goat IgG directed against rabbit F(ab′)2; wt, wild type; BSA, bovine serum albumin.
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↵2 C. M. Brown and N. O. Petersen, unpublished observations.
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- Received May 20, 1997.
- Revision received July 30, 1997.
