Abstract. We have shown that the heavy chain of clathrin is phosphorylated in chicken embryo fibroblast cells transformed by Rous sarcoma virus, but not in normal cells. Approximately 1 mol of phosphate is bound for every 5 mol of heavy chain in the maximally phosphorylated transformed cells. Two-thirds of the phosphate is on serine and one-third on tyrosine residues. Clathrin heavy chain is a substrate for pp60 .... in vitro. Cleveland analysis of the in vivo and in vitro clathrin heavy chain phosphopeptides, generated by protease V8 digestion, show labeled proteolytic fragments of similar molecular weight, suggesting that pp60 V-sfc could be directly responsible for the in vivo phosphorylation of clathrin. Phosphate is equally incorporated into clathrin in both the unassembled and the assembled clathrin pools, whereas [35S]methionine is preferentially incorporated into the assembled pool. In normal cells, clathrin visualized by immunofluorescent staining appears in a punctate pattern along the membrane surface and concentrated around the nucleus; in transformed cells the perinuclear staining is completely absent. The phosphorylation of clathrin heavy chain in transformed cells may be linked to previously observed transformation-dependent alterations in receptor-mediated endocytosis of ligands such as EGF and thrombin.T HE search for the underlying molecular mechanisms that explain transformation by Rous sarcoma virus (RSV) ~ has resulted in the identification of many substrates phosphorylated by the tyrosine kinase, pp60v-~% as well as numerous substrates phosphorylated by other kinases whose activities are indirectly regulated by RSV (for reviews see Cooper, 1985, 1986;Jove and Hanafusa, 1987). Morphological alterations of the cell surface and cytoskeleton are among the earliest manifestations of the src gene product (Ambros et al., 1975; Boschek et al., 1981). Among the cell surface changes, it has been observed that a number of receptors, including those for epidermal growth factor and thrombin, are cleared from the surface by endocytic events that may be altered by pp60 ~-s~ (Decker, 1983;Cooper et al., 1983;Zetter et al., 1977).Endocytosis often proceeds via coated pits and coated vesicles (for review see Pastan and Willingham, 1985), structures whose coats are known to include several phosphoproteins, among them the assembly factor polypeptides (Pauloin et al., 1982;Campbell et al., 1984;Keen et al., 1987) and the clathrin light chains (Usami et al., 1985;Schook and Puszkin, 1985;Bar-Zvi and Branton, 1986 phorylation both in vivo and in vitro (Keen and Black, 1986; Bar-Zyi et al., 1988b), phosphorylation of clathrin heavy chain, the major component of coated vesicles, has not been observed in normal cells. Here we show that transformation of secondary chick embryo fibroblasts (CEF) by RSV induces the phosphorylation of clathrin heavy chains on tyrosine and serine residues. The effect is paralleled by a partial cellular redistribution of clathrin.
Materials and Methods
Cell Culture and LabelingCEF were...