Through two superresolution microscopy techniques, STED and STORM, Spiess et al. visualize the organization of integrins in focal adhesions and show that active and inactive β1 integrins assemble into distinct nanoclusters within adhesions, suggesting the existence of a novel mechanism that locally coordinates integrin activity.
Overcoming cellular growth restriction, including the evasion of cellular senescence, is a hallmark of cancer. We report that PAK4 is overexpressed in all human breast cancer subtypes and associated with poor patient outcome. In mice, MMTV-PAK4 overexpression promotes spontaneous mammary cancer, while PAK4 gene depletion delays MMTV-PyMT driven tumors. Importantly, PAK4 prevents senescence-like growth arrest in breast cancer cells in vitro, in vivo and ex vivo, but is not needed in non-immortalized cells, while PAK4 overexpression in untransformed human mammary epithelial cells abrogates H-RAS-V12-induced senescence. Mechanistically, a PAK4 – RELB - C/EBPβ axis controls the senescence-like growth arrest and a PAK4 phosphorylation residue (RELB-Ser151) is critical for RELB-DNA interaction, transcriptional activity and expression of the senescence regulator C/EBPβ. These findings establish PAK4 as a promoter of breast cancer that can overcome oncogene-induced senescence and reveal a selective vulnerability of cancer to PAK4 inhibition.
Chaperonin containing tailless complex polypeptide 1 (CCT) forms a classical chaperonin barrel structure where two rings of subunits surround a central cavity. Each ring consists of eight distinct subunits, creating a complex binding interface that makes CCT unique among the chaperonins. In addition to acting as a multimeric chaperonin, there is increasing evidence indicating that the CCT subunits, when monomeric, possess additional functions. Here we assess the role of the CCT subunits individually, using a GFP (green fluorescent protein) tagging approach to express each of the subunits in their monomeric form in cultured mammalian cells. Over-expression of CCTdelta, but not the other seven CCT subunits, results in the appearance of numerous protrusions at the cell surface. Two point mutations, one in the apical domain and one in the ATP binding pocket of CCTdelta, that abolish protrusion formation have been identified, consistent with the apical domain containing a novel interaction site that is influenced by the ATPase activity in the equatorial domain. Structured illumination microscopy, together with sub-cellular fractionation, reveals that only the wild-type CCTdelta is associated with the plasma membrane, thus connecting spatial organization with surface protrusion formation. Expression of the equivalent subunit in yeast, GFP-Cct4, rescues growth of the temperature-sensitive strain cct4-1 at the non-permissive temperature, indicative of conserved subunit-specific activities for CCTdelta.
CCTε, a subunit of the oligomeric CCT molecular chaperone, interacts with the cotranscription factor MRTF-A, thus influencing MRTF-A nuclear accumulation upon serum stimulation. This establishes a novel function for CCTε when monomeric and reveals an extended role for CCT in the stringent quality control of actin.
p21-activated kinase 4 (PAK4) regulates cell proliferation, apoptosis, cell motility and F-actin remodeling, but the PAK4 interactome has not been systematically analyzed. Here, we comprehensively characterized the human PAK4 interactome by iTRAQ quantitative mass spectrometry of PAK4-immunoprecipitations. Consistent with its multiple reported functions, the PAK4 interactome was enriched in diverse protein networks, including the 14-3-3, proteasome, replication fork, CCT and Arp2/3 complexes. Because PAK4 co-immunoprecipitated most subunits of the Arp2/3 complex, we hypothesized that PAK4 may play a role in Arp2/3 dependent actin regulation. Indeed, we found that PAK4 interacts with and phosphorylates the nucleation promoting factor N-WASP at Ser484/Ser485 and promotes Arp2/3-dependent actin polymerization in vitro. Also, PAK4 ablation in vivo reduced N-WASP Ser484/Ser485 phosphorylation and altered the cellular balance between G- and F-actin as well as the actin organization. By presenting the PAK4 interactome, we here provide a powerful resource for further investigations and as proof of principle, we also indicate a novel mechanism by which PAK4 regulates actin cytoskeleton remodeling.
To explore the conservation of Src homology 3 (SH3) domain-mediated networks in evolution, we compared the specificity landscape of these domains among four yeast species, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Ashbya gossypii, Candida albicans, and Schizosaccharomyces pombe, encompassing 400 million years of evolution. We first aligned and catalogued the families of SH3-containing proteins in these four species to determine the relationships between homologous domains. Then, we tagged and purified all soluble SH3 domains (82 in total) to perform a quantitative peptide assay (SPOT) for each SH3 domain. All SPOT readouts were hierarchically clustered and we observed that the organization of the SH3 specificity landscape in three distinct profile classes remains conserved across these four yeast species. We also produced a specificity profile for each SH3 domain from manually aligned top SPOT hits and compared the within-family binding motif consensus. This analysis revealed a striking example of binding motif divergence in a C. albicans Rvs167 paralog, which cannot be explained by overall SH3 sequence or interface residue divergence, and we validated this specificity change with a yeast two-hybrid (Y2H) assay. In addition, we show that position-weighted matrices (PWM) compiled from SPOT assays can be used for binding motif screening in potential binding partners and present cases where motifs are either conserved or lost among homologous SH3 interacting proteins. Finally, by comparing pairwise SH3 sequence identity to binding profile correlation we show that for ~75% of all analyzed families the SH3 specificity profile was remarkably conserved over a large evolutionary distance. Thus, a high sequence identity within an SH3 domain family predicts conserved binding specificity, whereas divergence in sequence identity often coincided with a change in binding specificity within this family. As such, our results are important for future studies aimed at unraveling complex specificity networks of peptide recognition domains in higher eukaryotes, including mammals.
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