Background

The human POB1/REPS2 (Partner of RalBP1) protein is highly conserved in mammals where it has been suggested to function as a molecular scaffold recruiting proteins involved in vesicular traffic and linking them to the actin cytoskeleton remodeling machinery. More recently POB1/REPS2 was found highly expressed in androgen-dependent prostate cancer cell lines, while one of its isoforms (isoform 2) is down regulated during prostate cancer progression.

Results

In this report we characterize the central proline rich domain of POB1/REPS2 and we describe for the first time its functional role in receptor endocytosis. We show that the ectopic expression of this domain has a dominant negative effect on the endocytosis of activated epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) while leaving transferrin receptor endocytosis unaffected. By a combination of different approaches (phage display, bioinformatics predictions, peptide arrays, mutagenic analysis, in vivo co-immunoprecipitation), we have identified two closely spaced binding motifs for 14-3-3 and for the SH3 of the proteins Amphiphysin II and Grb2. Differently from wild type, proline rich domains that are altered in these motifs do not inhibit EGFR endocytosis, suggesting that these binding motifs play a functional role in this process.

Conclusion

Our findings are relevant to the characterization of the molecular mechanism underlying the involvement of POB1/REPS2, SH3 and 14-3-3 proteins in receptor endocytosis, suggesting that 14-3-3 could work by bridging the EGF receptor and the scaffold protein POB1/REPS2.

Multidomain proteins predominate in eukaryotic proteomes. Individual functions assigned to different sequence segments combine to create a complex function for the whole protein. While on-line resources are available for revealing globular domains in sequences, there has hitherto been no comprehensive collection of small functional sites/motifs comparable to the globular domain resources, yet these are as important for the function of multidomain proteins. Short linear peptide motifs are used for cell compartment targeting, protein–protein interaction, regulation by phosphorylation, acetylation, glycosylation and a host of other post-translational modifications. ELM, the Eukaryotic Linear Motif server at http://elm.eu.org/, is a new bioinformatics resource for investigating candidate short non-globular functional motifs in eukaryotic proteins, aiming to fill the void in bioinformatics tools. Sequence comparisons with short motifs are difficult to evaluate because the usual significance assessments are inappropriate. Therefore the server is implemented with several logical filters to eliminate false positives. Current filters are for cell compartment, globular domain clash and taxonomic range. In favourable cases, the filters can reduce the number of retained matches by an order of magnitude or more.