We have previously shown that a minimized insulin receptor (IR) consisting of the first 468 amino acids of the insulin receptor fused to 16 amino acids from the C terminus of the ␣-subunit (CT domain) bound insulin with nanomolar affinity (Kristensen, C., Wiberg, F. C., Schä ffer, L., and Andersen, A. S. (1998) J. Biol. Chem. 273, 17780 -17786). In the present study, we show that a smaller construct that has the first 308 residues fused to the CT domain also binds insulin. Insulin receptor fragments consisting of the first 468 or 308 residues did not bind insulin. However, when these fragments were mixed with a synthetic peptide corresponding to the CT domain, insulin binding was detectable. At concentrations of 10 M CT peptide, insulin binding was fully reconstituted yielding apparent affinities of 9 -11 nM. To further investigate the minimum requirement for the length of the N terminus of IR, we tested smaller receptor fragments for insulin binding in the presence of the CT peptide and found that a fragment consisting of the first 255 amino acids of IR was able to fully reconstitute the insulin binding site, yielding an apparent affinity of 11 ؎ 4 nM for insulin.Insulin mediates its effects by binding to tyrosine kinase receptors in the plasma membrane of targets cells. The IR 1 protein is a dimer of two identical ␣ monomers covalently linked by disulfide bonds in a -␣-␣- conformation (1). The IR structure function has recently been reviewed (2). Predictions of the structure of the IR ectodomain have been based on sequence alignments with homologous domains in other receptors, reviewed by . The consensus from these alignments is that the first 468 residues of the ␣-subunit contain two large homologous domains L1 and L2 separated by a cysteine-rich (CYS) region (4, 5). A crystal structure of the L1-CYS-L2 region of the homologous IGFI receptor (IGFIR) has been solved, confirming this domain structure (6). However, this construct does not bind ligand, whereas studies on minimized receptors show that, when fusing the L1-CYS-L2 domain to either of the C-terminal ␣-subunit sequences, IGFIR residues 691-706 or IR residues 704 -719 (CT domains), 2 the construct does bind ligand (7). The affinity of the minimized insulin receptor (mIR) for insulin is ϳ5-10 nM or similar to what is found for the soluble IR ectodomain (sIR) (8). The solubilized holoreceptor (hIR) binds insulin with an affinity that is almost 1000-fold better than mIR and sIR (9). Recently, we reported that, when expressing a receptor construct in which 48 residues of the exon 9 region of the ␣-subunit were deleted, we obtained a dimeric ␣-␣ receptor fragment that bound insulin with full holoreceptor affinity. The data showed that the picomolar affinity was associated with the dimeric structure of the ␣-subunits, whereas monomers had nanomolar affinity for insulin (9). Moreover the dimeric construct (mIR.Fn0/Ex10) also displayed accelerated dissociation of labeled insulin in the presence of excess unlabeled insulin, which is another characteristic of ...