HDX-MS reveals structural determinants for RORγ hyperactivation by synthetic agonists
- The Scripps Research Institute, United States
Abstract
Members of the nuclear receptor (NR) superfamily regulate both physiological and pathophysiological processes ranging from development and metabolism to inflammation and cancer. Synthetic small molecules targeting NRs are often deployed as therapeutics to correct aberrant NR signaling or as chemical probes to explore the role of the receptor in physiology. Nearly half of NRs do not have specific cognate ligands (termed orphan NRs) and it's unclear if they possess ligand dependent activities. Here we demonstrate that ligand-dependent action of the orphan RORγ can be defined by selectively disrupting putative endogenous-but not synthetic-ligand binding. Furthermore, the characterization of a library of RORγ modulators reveals that structural dynamics of the receptor assessed by HDX-MS correlate with activity in biochemical and cell-based assays. These findings, corroborated with X-ray co-crystallography and site-directed mutagenesis, collectively reveal the structural determinants of RORγ activation, which is critical for designing RORγ agonists for cancer immunotherapy.
Data availability
Due to their large size, all the raw data from MS analysis is available from the authors. HDX Workbench outputs files have been uploaded to figshare (10.6084/m9.figshare.8230685) along with a treated data summary which summarizes the findings from the raw data.
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Data fromfigshare, 10.6084/m9.figshare.8230685.
Article and author information
Author details
Timothy S Strutzenberg
Funding
National Cancer Institute
- Patrick R Griffin
National Institute of General Medical Sciences
- Timothy S Strutzenberg
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Peter Tontonoz, University of California, Los Angeles, United States
Version history
- Received: March 27, 2019
- Accepted: June 1, 2019
- Accepted Manuscript published: June 7, 2019 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: June 17, 2019 (version 2)
- Version of Record updated: October 18, 2019 (version 3)
Copyright
© 2019, Strutzenberg et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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HDX-MS reveals structural determinants for RORγ hyperactivation by synthetic agonists
eLife 8:e47172.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.47172
Further reading
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