Tyrosine intrinsic importance

Figure 1.9 Examples of functionally important intrinsic metal atoms in proteins, (a) The di-iron center of the enzyme ribonucleotide reductase. Two iron atoms form a redox center that produces a free radical in a nearby tyrosine side chain. The iron atoms are bridged by a glutamic acid residue and a negatively charged oxygen atom called a p-oxo bridge. The coordination of the iron atoms is completed by histidine, aspartic acid, and glutamic acid side chains as well as water molecules, (b) The catalytically active zinc atom in the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase. The zinc atom is coordinated to the protein by one histidine and two cysteine side chains. During catalysis zinc binds an alcohol molecule in a suitable position for hydride transfer to the coenzyme moiety, a nicotinamide, [(a) Adapted from P. Nordlund et al., Nature 345 593-598, 1990.)...

Protein-protein interaction domain that binds to polyproline motifs with the sequence PXXP. Particularly important in assembling protein complexes at activated receptors which contain intrinsic tyrosine kinases. 

Single protein kinases such as PKA, PKC, and Ca +-calmodulin (CaM)-kinases, which result in the phosphorylation of serine and threonine residues in target proteins, play a very important role in hormone action. The discovery that the EGF receptor contains an intrinsic tyrosine kinase activity that is activated by the binding of the hgand EGF was an important breakthrough. The insuhn and IGF-I receptors also contain intrinsic... 

The major reasons for using intrinsic fluorescence and phosphorescence to study conformation are that these spectroscopies are extremely sensitive, they provide many specific parameters to correlate with physical structure, and they cover a wide time range, from picoseconds to seconds, which allows the study of a variety of different processes. The time scale of tyrosine fluorescence extends from picoseconds to a few nanoseconds, which is a good time window to obtain information about rotational diffusion, intermolecular association reactions, and conformational relaxation in the presence and absence of cofactors and substrates. Moreover, the time dependence of the fluorescence intensity and anisotropy decay can be used to test predictions from molecular dynamics.(167) In using tyrosine to study the dynamics of protein structure, it is particularly important that we begin to understand the basis for the anisotropy decay of tyrosine in terms of the potential motions of the phenol ring.(221) For example, the frequency of flips about the C -C bond of tyrosine appears to cover a time range from milliseconds to nanoseconds.(222)... 

Fig. 5.5. General functions of transmembrane receptors. Extracellular signals convert the transmembrane receptor from the inactive form R to the active form R. The activated receptor transmits the signal to effector proteins next in the reaction sequence. Important effector reactions are the activation of heterotrimeric G-proteins, of protein tyrosine kinases and of protein tyrosine phosphatases. The tyrosine kinases and tyrosine phosphatases may be an intrinsic part of the receptor or they may be associated with the receptor. The activated receptor may also include adaptor proteins in the signaling pathway or it may induce opening of ion channels.

Growth hormones, important in diabetes and cancer, activate a receptor with an intrinsic intracellular tyrosine protein kinase activity that passes on the signal by phosphorylating other proteins, often kinases themselves. To date, no specific second messengers have been associated with these systems. The amplification occurs by the turn-on of the receptor-associated protein kinase activity that can phosphorylate many proteins. 

We turn now to a second important class of cell-surface receptors, the cytokine receptors, whose cytosolic domains are closely associated with a member of a family of cytosolic protein tyrosine kinases, the JAK kinases. A third class of receptors, the receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs), contain intrinsic protein tyrosine kinase activity in their cytosolic domains. The mechanisms by which cytokine receptors and receptor tyrosine kinases become activated by ligands are very similar, and there is considerable overlap in the intracellular signal-transduction pathways triggered by activation of receptors in both classes. In this section, we first describe some similarities in signaling from these two receptor classes. We then discuss the JAK-STAT pathway, which is initiated mainly by activation of cytokine receptors. 

Affinity labeling experiments with bromoacetyl compounds are biased by two important limitations, which often make them inferior to comparable photoaffinity labels. The number of properly oriented amino acid functional groups that can undergo a nucleophilic displacement reaction in the active site of a protein is limited to histidine, lysine, tyrosine, cysteine, and glutamic acid. Reactions are strongly influenced by the intrinsic piC of the respective amino acid residue and by the pH of the incubation mixture. It should be noted that bromoacetyl compounds can also react with RNA . The other limitation is that the time point for the affinity labeling reaction to occur cannot be freely chosen. One can only incubate the reactants and let them react for a given time. Reactions are usually quite slow and take considerable time for completion, which can vary between 1 and 20 hr. - ... 

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