Mechanisms of G Protein Coupled Receptor Signaling in the Yeast Pheromone Pathway

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 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): G Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) play critical roles in diverse signaling pathways with important implications for physiology and medicine. The basic outlines of GPCR-mediated signaling are well known- agonist binding to receptors stimulates nucleotide exchange on a trimeric G protein, leading to subunit dissociation and activation of downstream effectors. However, aspects of the underlying biochemical mechanisms by which binding of different ligands leads to particular signaling outputs remains poorly understood. Study of the yeast pheromone response pathway as a genetically tractable and well-characterized model for studying general properties of GPCR signaling systems have revealed unexpected aspects of the receptor behavior that are not consistent with simple models relating signaling output to ligand-binding input. These include: 1) the observation that signaling responses to binding of agonist to the pheromone receptor Ste2p, considering both efficacy and potency, are not affected by changes in receptor expression over an ~100 fold range of receptor levels; 2) the observation that well characterized antagonists of the pheromone response pathway, when mixed with agonist, fail by a large margin to inhibit signaling to the extent that would be predicted based on known affinities of the agonist and antagonist for receptors; 3) the observation that binding of antagonists to Ste2p receptors stimulates receptor internalization even though they do not elicit stimulation of G protein mediated responses. Taken together, these findings support the idea that receptor behavior is much more complex than a simple equilibrium between on and off states and, in particular, that there is a significant negative element to GPCR signaling that, in the absence of ligand, inhibits G protein activation, but that may be reversed by binding of antagonist to receptors. The proposed approaches for understanding these findings include testing for physical association between inactivated receptors and G proteins, identification of mutated pathway components that specifically alter the described behaviors, and characterization and manipulation of the mechanisms of the antagonist-dependent endocytosis. We will also investigate the functional role of receptor-receptor interactions by conducting a fluorescence-based genetic screen for receptors with specific defects in oligomerization and analyzing the signaling properties of the mutant receptors. Taken together, the results are expected to provide a more realistic and detailed view of the processes that relate signaling responses to ligand occupancy of receptors that can be expected to be applicable to other GPCR pathways.