Aleksandrov, Andrei A.

The epithelial chloride channel CFTR is a glycoprotein that is modified by two N-linked oligosaccharides. The most common mutant CFTR protein in patients with cystic fibrosis, ΔF508, is misfolded and retained by ER quality control. As oligosaccharide moieties of glycoproteins are known to mediate interactions with ER lectin chaperones, we investigated the role of N-linked glycosylation in the processing of wild-type and ΔF508 CFTR. We found that N-glycosylation and ER lectin interactions are not major determinants of trafficking of wild-type and ΔF508 from the ER to the plasma membrane. Unglycosylated CFTR, generated by removal of glycosylation sites or treatment of cells with the N-glycosylation inhibitor tunicamycin, did not bind calnexin, but did traffic to the cell surface and exhibited chloride channel activity. Most importantly, unglycosylated ΔF508 CFTR still could not escape quality control in the early secretory pathway and remained associated with the ER. However, the absence of N-linked oligosaccharides did reduce the stability of wild-type CFTR, causing significantly more-rapid turnover in post-ER compartments. Surprisingly, the individual N-linked carbohydrates do not play equivalent roles and modulate the fate of the wild-type protein in different ways in its early biosynthetic pathway.

The cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) contains two nucleotide-binding domains (NBDs) or ATP-binding cassettes (ABCs) that characterize a large family of membrane transporters. Although the three-dimensional structures of these domains from several ABC proteins have been determined, this is not the case for CFTR, and hence the domains are defined simply on the basis of sequence alignment. The functional C-terminal boundary of NBD1 of CFTR was located by analysis of chloride channel function [Chan, Csanady, Seto-Young, Nairn and Gadsby (2000) J. Gen. Physiol. 116, 163–180]. However, the boundary between the C-terminal end of NBD2 and sequences further downstream in the whole protein, that are important for its cellular localization and endocytotic turnover, has not been defined. We have now done this by assaying the influence of progressive C-terminal truncations on photolabelling of NBD2 by 8-azido-ATP, which reflects hydrolysis, as well as binding, at that domain, and on NBD2-dependent channel gating itself. The boundary defined in this way is between residues 1420 and 1424, which corresponds to the final β-strand in aligned NBDs whose structures have been determined. Utilization of this information should facilitate the generation of monodisperse NBD2 polypeptides for structural analysis, which until now has not been possible. The established boundary includes within NBD2 a hydrophobic patch of four residues (1413–1416) previously shown to be essential for CFTR maturation and stability [Gentzsch and Riordan (2001) J. Biol. Chem. 276, 1291–1298]. This hydrophobic cluster is conserved in most ABC proteins, and on alignment with ones of known structure constitutes the penultimate β-strand of the domain which is likely to participate in essential structure-stabilizing β-sheet formation.