Insulin receptor signalling has a central role in mammalian biology, regulating cellular metabolism, growth, division, differentiation and survival1,2. Insulin resistance contributes to the pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes mellitus and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease3; aberrant signalling occurs in diverse cancers, exacerbated by crosstalk with the homologous type 1 insulin-like growth factor receptor (IGF1R)4. Despite more than three decades of investigation, the three-dimensional structure of the insulin–insulin receptor complex has proved elusive, confounded by the complexity of producing the receptor protein. Here we present the first view, to our knowledge, of the interaction of insulin with its primary binding site on the insulin receptor, on the basis of four crystal structures of insulin bound to truncated insulin receptor constructs. The direct interaction of insulin with the first leucine-rich-repeat domain (L1) of insulin receptor is seen to be sparse, the hormone instead engaging the insulin receptor carboxy-terminal α-chain (αCT) segment, which is itself remodelled on the face of L1 upon insulin binding. Contact between insulin and L1 is restricted to insulin B-chain residues. The αCT segment displaces the B-chain C-terminal β-strand away from the hormone core, revealing the mechanism of a long-proposed conformational switch in insulin upon receptor engagement. This mode of hormone–receptor recognition is novel within the broader family of receptor tyrosine kinases5. We support these findings by photo-crosslinking data that place the suggested interactions into the context of the holoreceptor and by isothermal titration calorimetry data that dissect the hormone–insulin receptor interface. Together, our findings provide an explanation for a wealth of biochemical data from the insulin receptor and IGF1R systems relevant to the design of therapeutic insulin analogues.

No abstract

Insulin provides a classical model of a globular protein, yet how the hormone changes conformation to engage its receptor has long been enigmatic. Interest has focused on the C-terminal Bchain segment, critical for protective self-assembly in β cells and receptor binding at target tissues. Insight may be obtained from truncated "microreceptors" that reconstitute the primary hormone-binding site (α-subunit domains L1 and αCT). We demonstrate that, on microreceptor binding, this segment undergoes concerted hinge-like rotation at its B20-B23 β-turn, coupling reorientation of Phe B24 to a 60°rotation of the B25-B28 β-strand away from the hormone core to lie antiparallel to the receptor's L1-β 2 sheet. Opening of this hinge enables conserved nonpolar side chains (Ile A2 , Val A3 , Val B12 , Phe B24 , and Phe B25 ) to engage the receptor. Restraining the hinge by nonstandard mutagenesis preserves native folding but blocks receptor binding, whereas its engineered opening maintains activity at the price of protein instability and nonnative aggregation. Our findings rationalize properties of clinical mutations in the insulin family and provide a previously unidentified foundation for designing therapeutic analogs. We envisage that a switch between free and receptorbound conformations of insulin evolved as a solution to conflicting structural determinants of biosynthesis and function.diabetes mellitus | signal transduction | receptor tyrosine kinase | metabolism | protein structure H ow insulin engages the insulin receptor has inspired speculation ever since the structure of the free hormone was determined by Hodgkin and colleagues in 1969 (1, 2). Over the ensuing decades, anomalies encountered in studies of analogs have suggested that the hormone undergoes a conformational change on receptor binding: in particular, that the C-terminal β-strand of the B chain (residues B24-B30) releases from the helical core to expose otherwise-buried nonpolar surfaces (the detachment model) (3-6). Interest in the B-chain β-strand was further motivated by the discovery of clinical mutations within it associated with diabetes mellitus (DM) (7). Analysis of residuespecific photo-cross-linking provided evidence that both the detached strand and underlying nonpolar surfaces engage the receptor (8).The relevant structural biology is as follows. The insulin receptor is a disulfide-linked (αβ) 2 receptor tyrosine kinase (Fig. 1A), the extracellular α-subunits together binding a single insulin molecule with high affinity (9). Involvement of the two α-subunits is asymmetric: the primary insulin-binding site (site 1*) comprises the central β-sheet (L1-β 2 ) of the first leucine-rich repeat domain (L1) of one α-subunit and the partially helical Cterminal segment (αCT) of the other α-subunit (Fig. 1A) (10). Such binding initiates conformational changes leading to transphosphorylation of the β-subunits' intracellular tyrosine kinase (TK) domains. Structures of wild-type (WT) insulin (or analogs) bound to extracellular receptor fragments were recently...

Understanding the structural biology of the insulin receptor and how it signals is of key importance in the development of insulin analogs to treat diabetes. We report here a cryo-electron microscopy structure of a single insulin bound to a physiologically relevant, high-affinity version of the receptor ectodomain, the latter generated through attachment of C-terminal leucine zipper elements to overcome the conformational flexibility associated with ectodomain truncation. The resolution of the cryo-electron microscopy maps is 3.2 Å in the insulin-binding region and 4.2 Å in the membrane-proximal region. The structure reveals how the membrane proximal domains of the receptor come together to effect signalling and how insulin’s negative cooperativity of binding likely arises. Our structure further provides insight into the high affinity of certain super-mitogenic insulins. Together, these findings provide a new platform for insulin analog investigation and design.

PC2 and furin are two recently identified members of a class of mammalian proteins homologous to the yeast precursor processing protease kex2 and the bacterial subtilisins. We have used the polymerase chain reaction to identify and clone a cDNA (PC3) from the mouse AtT20 anterior pituitary cell line that represents an additional member of this growing family of mammalian proteases. PC3 encodes a 753-residue protein that begins with a signal peptide and contains a 292-residue domain closely related to the catalytic modules of PC2, furin, and kex2. Within this region 58%, 65%, and 50% of the amino acids of PC3 are identical to those of the aligned PC2, furin, and kex2 sequences, respectively, and the catalytically important Asp, His, and Ser residues are all conserved. On Northern blots, PC3 hybridizes to two transcripts of 3 and 5 kilobases. Tissue distribution studies indicate that both PC2 and PC3 are expressed in a variety of neuroendocrine tissues, including pancreatic islets and brain, but are not expressed in liver, kidney, skeletal muscle, and spleen. The high degree of similarity of PC3, PC2, and furin suggests that they are all members of a superfamily of mammalian proteases that are involved in the processing of prohormones and/or other protein precursors. In contrast to furin, PC3, like PC2, lacks a hydrophobic transmembrane anchor, but it has a potential C-terminal amphipathic helical segment similar to the putative membrane anchor of carboxypeptidase H. These and other differences suggest that these proteins carry out compartmentalized proteolysis within cells, such as processing within regulated versus constitutive secretory pathways.

Limited proteolysis is a widely occurring mechanism in protein biosynthesis. Protein precursors can be classified according to their functions, localization within cell compartments, and enzymic cleavage mechanisms. The presecretory proteins represent an important class of very rapidly turning over precursors which play an early role in the sequestration of secretory products and whose cleavage appears to be intimately associated with structures formed at the ribosome-membrane junction during protein synthesis. A model is proposed which predicts that the prepeptide forms a beta-pleated sheet structure with other components of the membrane which results in the transfer of a loop of peptide across the microsomal membrane. Proinsulin is representative of the general class of proproteins that are processed post-translationally within their secretory cells either during the formation and maturation of secretory granules (peptides hormones and neurotransmitters, serum albumins) or during the assembly of macromolecular structures (virus capsules, membrane-associated enzyme complexes). The former group are cleaved by Golgi-associated proteases having tryptic and carboxypeptidase B-like specificity. Some precursors are secreted as such and processed extracellularly either in the circulation or at special sites (procollagens, zymogens, provenoms, vitellogenins).

No abstract

The C-terminal segment of the human insulin receptor α-chain (designated αCT) is critical to insulin binding as has been previously demonstrated by alanine scanning mutagenesis and photo-crosslinking. To date no information regarding the structure of this segment within the receptor has been available. We employ here the technique of thermal-factor sharpening to enhance the interpretability of the electron-density maps associated with the earlier crystal structure of the human insulin receptor ectodomain. The αCT segment is now resolved as being engaged with the central β-sheet of the first leucine-rich repeat (L1) domain of the receptor. The segment is α-helical in conformation and extends 11 residues N-terminal of the classical αCTsegment boundary originally defined by peptide mapping. This tandem structural element (αCT-L1) thus defines the intact primary insulin-binding surface of the apo-receptor. The structure, together with isothermal titration calorimetry data of mutant αCT peptides binding to an insulin minireceptor, leads to the conclusion that putative "insulin-mimetic" peptides in the literature act at least in part as mimics of the αCT segment as well as of insulin. Photo-cross-linking by novel bifunctional insulin derivatives demonstrates that the interaction of insulin with the αCT segment and the L1 domain occurs in trans, i.e., these components of the primary binding site are contributed by alternate α-chains within the insulin receptor homodimer. The tandem structural element defines a new target for the design of insulin agonists for the treatment of diabetes mellitus.inding of insulin to the insulin receptor initiates a signaling cascade in target tissues as the first step in the regulation of metabolic homeostasis. However, a molecular description of how insulin binds and activates its receptor remains elusive. Whereas determination of the structure of insulin (Fig. 1A) represented an early triumph of protein crystallography (2), the structure of the much larger receptor ectodomain homodimer (in apo form) has only recently been crystallographically analyzed (3). The latter structure and its implications for the nature of the hormone-binding sites have been extensively reviewed (4-7). Briefly, the insulin receptor is a disulfide-linked dimer wherein each proreceptor monomer is proteolytically cleaved into an N-terminal α-chain and a C-terminal β-chain (Fig. 1B). A single disulfide bond links the α-and β-chains within each monomer. The extracellular portion of the insulin receptor includes both α-chains as well as 194 residues (Ser724-Lys917) of each β-chain. Each receptor monomer consists of several structural domains (Fig. 1B), including a leucine-rich repeat domain L1 (residues 1-157), a cysteine-rich region (CR, residues 158-310), a second leucine-rich repeat domain L2 (residues 311-470), and three fibronectin type-III domains: FnIII-1 (residues 471-595), FnIII-2 (residues 596-808), and FnIII-3 (residues 809-906). FnIII-2 contains a ∼120-residue insert domain (ID, residues 638-756) that co...