International Immunology Advance Access originally published online on December 16, 2005
International Immunology 2006 18(1):19-29; doi:10.1093/intimm/dxh338
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Identification of core functional region of murine IL-4 using peptide phage display and molecular modeling
1 Laboratory of Molecular Cell Biology, Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Shanghai Institute for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 320 Yueyang Road, Shanghai 200031, China
2 State Key Laboratory of Bio-organic and Natural Products Chemistry, Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200032, China
3 Institute of Materia Medica, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 201203, China
4 GL Biochem (Shanghai) Ltd, 351 Guo Shoujing Road, Shanghai 201203, China
5 Department of Immunology, MD Anderson Cancer Center, 7455 Fannin, Unit 902, Houston, TX 77030-1903, USA
6 Immunology Division, E-Institutes of Shanghai Universities
* Correspondence to: B. Sun; E-mail: bsun{at}sibs.ac.cn, Zx. Xia; E-mail: xiazx{at}mail.sloc.ac.cn
Murine IL-4 is a pleiotropic cytokine with undefined core functional region for eliciting downstream signaling. We used molecular modeling to predict the binding sites recognized by an anti-IL-4-neutralizing mAb (11B.11) and peptide phage display to delineate their makeup. The results of these approaches were confirmed by site-directed mutagenesis analysis. The results suggest that the amino acid residues spanning from 79 to 86 (QRLFRAFR) on IL-4 are of the major binding site for 11B.11. Furthermore, the functional experiments demonstrate that the residues R80, R83 and R86, which are located in the helix C of murine IL-4, play a crucial role in binding to the IL-4R
-chain. Taken together, a new core functional region of murine IL-4 is identified, which provides new insight into the interaction between IL-4 and IL-4R
. In addition, the results demonstrate that 11B.11 binds to a core functional region of murine IL-4, which prevents this cytokine from interacting with its cognate receptor.
Keywords: 11B.11, core functional region of IL-4, IL-4, molecular modeling, peptide phage display