Project description:The large family of SCF ubiquitin ligases catalyze ubiquitylation by bridging protein substrates and ubiquitin-modifying enzymes. S. cerevisiae SCFs employ a sole, essential enzyme, Cdc34, to build poly-ubiquitin chains required for degradation. However, humans have no less than six chain building enzymes associated with SCFs, including the long assumed to be essential Cdc34 orthologs, UBE2R1 and UBE2R2. Furthermore, uncertainty regarding the physiological concentrations of ubiquitin-modifying enzymes has hindered in vitro mechanistic work. Proteomics was used to estimate enzyme levels in cells, and ubiquitylation assays were employed to quantitatively compare enzyme activities. The results show that UBE2R2 alone has negligible ubiquitylation activity at physiological concentrations, and the ablation of UBE2R1/2 had no effect on the stability of SCF substrates in cells. A genome-wide CRISPR screen revealed that UBE2G1 buffers against the deletion of UBE2R1/2. UBE2G1 had robust in vitro activity with SCF, and UBE2G1 knockdown in cells lacking UBE2R1/2 resulted in stabilization of the SCF substrate p27 as well as the Cul3-RING ligase substrate NRF2. The results reveal the human SCF enzyme system is heavily buffered and suggest that SCF specificity is diversified by association with multiple enzyme partners.
Project description:The cullin-RING E3 ligase (CRL) network comprises over 300 unique complexes that switch from inactive to activated conformations upon site-specific cullin modification by the ubiquitin-like protein NEDD8. Assessing cellular repertoires of activated CRL complexes is critical for understanding eukaryotic regulation. However, probes surveying networks controlled by site-specific ubiquitin-like protein modifications are lacking. We report development of a synthetic antibody recognizing the active conformation of a NEDD8-linked cullin. We established a pipeline probing cellular networks of activated CUL1-, CUL2-, CUL3- and CUL4-containing CRLs, revealing the CRL complexes responding to stimuli. Profiling several cell types showed their baseline neddylated CRL repertoires vary, prime efficiency of targeted protein degradation, and are differentially rewired across distinct primary cell activation pathways. Thus, conformation-specific probes can permit nonenzymatic activity-based profiling across a system of numerous multiprotein complexes, which in the case of neddylated CRLs reveals widespread regulation and could facilitate development of degrader drugs.