Quantitative phosphoproteomics reveals ectopic ATP synthase on mesenchymal stem cells to promote tumor progression via ERK/c-Fos pathway activation

The tumor microenvironment (TME), which comprises cellular and noncellular components, is involved in the complex process of cancer development. Emerging evidence suggests that mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), one of the vital regulators of the TME, foster tumor progression through paracrine secretion. However, the comprehensive phosphosignaling pathways that are mediated by MSC-secreting factors have not yet been fully established. In this study, we attempt to dissect the MSC-triggered mechanism in lung cancer using quantitative phosphoproteomics. A total of 1958 phosphorylation sites are identified in lung cancer cells stimulated with MSC-conditioned medium. Integrative analysis of the identified phosphoproteins and predicted kinases demonstrates that MSC-conditioned medium functionally promotes the proliferation and migration of lung cancer via the ERK/phospho-c-Fos-S374 pathway. Recent studies have reported that extracellular ATP accumulates in the TME and stimulates the P2X7R on the cancer cell membrane via purinergic signaling. We observe that ectopic ATP synthase is located on the surface of MSCs and excreted extracellular ATP into the lung cancer microenvironment to trigger the ERK/phospho-c-Fos-S374 pathway, which is consistent with these previous findings. Our results suggest that ectopic ATP synthase on the surface of MSCs releases extracellular ATP into the TME, which promotes cancer progression via activation of the ERK/phospho-c-Fos-S374 pathway.     

Biodistribution studies with tumor-targeting bispecific antibodies reveal selective accumulation at the tumor site

Bispecific antibodies are proteins that bind two different antigens and may retarget immune cells with a binding moiety specific for a leukocyte marker. A binding event in blood could in principle prevent antibody extravasation and accumulation at the site of disease. In this study, we produced and characterized two tetravalent bispecific antibodies that bind with high affinity to the alternatively-spliced EDB domain of fibronectin, a tumor-associated antigen. The bispecific antibodies simultaneously engaged the cognate antigens (murine T cell co-receptor CD3 and hen egg lysozyme) and selectively accumulated on murine tumors in vivo. The results, which were in agreement with predictions based on pharmacokinetic modeling and antibody binding characteristics, confirmed that bispecific antibodies can reach abluminal targets without being blocked by peripheral blood leukocytes.     

BCR-ABL inactivates cytosolic PTEN through Casein Kinase II mediated tail phosphorylation

The tumor suppressive function of PTEN is exerted within 2 different cellular compartments. In the cytosol-membrane, it negatively regulates PI3K-AKT pathway through the de-phosphorylation of phosphatidylinositol (3,4,5)-triphosphate (PIP3), therefore blocking one of the major signaling transduction pathways in tumorigenesis. In the nucleus, PTEN controls genomic stability and cellular proliferation through phosphatase independent mechanisms. Importantly, impairments in PTEN cellular compartmentalization, changes in protein levels and post-transductional modifications affect PTEN tumor suppressive functions. Targeting mechanisms that inactivate PTEN promotes apoptosis induction of cancer cells, without affecting normal cells, with appealing therapeutic implications. Recently, we have shown that BCR-ABL promotes PTEN nuclear exclusion by favoring HAUSP mediated PTEN de-ubiquitination in Chronic Myeloid Leukemia. Here, we show that nuclear exclusion of PTEN is associated with PTEN inactivation in the cytoplasm of CML cells. In particular, BCR-ABL promotes Casein Kinase II-mediated PTEN tail phosphorylation with consequent inhibition of the phosphatase activity toward PIP3. Targeting Casein Kinase II promotes PTEN reactivation with apoptosis induction. We therefore propose a novel BCR-ABL/CKII/PTEN pathway as a potential target to achieve synthetic lethality with tyrosine kinase inhibitors.     

T-RMSD: A Fine-grained, Structure-based Classification Method and its Application to the Functional Characterization of TNF Receptors

This study addresses the relation between structural and functional similarity in proteins. We introduce a novel method named tree based on root mean square deviation (T-RMSD), which uses distance RMSD (dRMSD) variations to build fine-grained structure-based classifications of proteins. The main improvement of the T-RMSD over similar methods, such as Dali, is its capacity to produce the equivalent of a bootstrap value for each cluster node. We validated our approach on two domain families studied extensively for their role in many biological and pathological pathways: the small GTPase RAS superfamily and the cysteine-rich domains (CRDs) associated with the tumor necrosis factor receptors (TNFRs) family. Our analysis showed that T-RMSD is able to automatically recover and refine existing classifications. In the case of the small GTPase ARF subfamily, T-RMSD can distinguish GTP- from GDP-bound states, while in the case of CRDs it can identify two new subgroups associated with well defined functional features (ligand binding and formation of ligand pre-assembly complex). We show how hidden Markov models (HMMs) can be built on these new groups and propose a methodology to use these models simultaneously in order to do fine-grained functional genomic annotation without known 3D structures. T-RMSD, an open source freeware incorporated in the T-Coffee package, is available online.     

Recombinant GST-human osteopontin fusion protein is functional in RGD-dependent cell adhesion

Osteopontin (OPN) is a secreted phosphoprotein expressed by many tumor cells, as well as a limited set of normal cells. Native OPN has been shown to support cell adhesion in an RGD-peptide-inhibitable fashion. Here we expressed human OPN in E. coli as a recombinant fusion protein with glutathione-S-transferase (GST). We report that the GST-OPN fusion protein has functional activity. PAP2 (ras-transformed, metastatic murine NIH 3T3) and MDA-MB-435 human mammary carcinoma cells bound to GST-OPN in an in vitro cell adhesion assay nearly as well as to native bovine OPN. Adhesion to the recombinant fusion protein was blocked by addition of GRGDS peptide, suggesting that the cells adhere to the recombinant and native OPN proteins by similar, integrin-mediated mechanisms. Adhesion to both sources of OPN also was inhibited by thrombin treatment of the protein. Thrombin cleaves GST from OPN in the fusion protein, and also cleaves internally in OPN, adjacent to the RGD sequence of the protein. Our results suggest that (a) thrombin cleavage of native OPN may be a natural regulator of OPN function, and (b) the majority of OPN cell binding activity is mediated by the RGD sequence in the protein backbone, with little or no requirement for post-translational modifications that occur in native OPN for adhesive function as measured here.     

Immune-regulated IDO1-dependent tryptophan metabolism is source of one-carbon units for pancreatic cancer and stellate cells

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