A link between increased transforming activity of lymphoma-derived MYC mutant alleles, their defective regulation by p107, and altered phosphorylation of the c-Myc transactivation domain.

The c-Myc protein is a transcription factor with an N-terminal transcriptional regulatory domain and C-terminal oligomerization and DNA-binding motifs. Previous studies have demonstrated that p107, a protein related to the retinoblastoma protein, binds to the c-Myc transcriptional activation domain and suppresses its activity. We sought to characterize the transforming activity and transcriptional properties of lymphoma-derived mutant MYC alleles. Alleles encoding c-Myc proteins with missense mutations in the transcriptional regulatory domain were more potent than wild-type c-Myc in transforming rodent fibroblasts. Although the mutant c-Myc proteins retained their binding to p107 in in vitro and in vivo assays, p107 failed to suppress their transcriptional activation activities. Many of the lymphoma-derived MYC alleles contain missense mutations that result in substitution for the threonine at codon 58 or affect sequences flanking this amino acid. We observed that in vivo phosphorylation of Thr-58 was absent in a lymphoma cell line with a mutant MYC allele containing a missense mutation flanking codon 58. Our in vitro studies suggest that phosphorylation of Thr-58 in wild-type c-Myc was dependent on cyclin A and required prior phosphorylation of Ser-62 by a p107-cyclin A-CDK complex. In contrast, Thr-58 remained unphosphorylated in two representative mutant c-Myc transactivation domains in vitro. Our studies suggest that missense mutations in MYC may be selected for during lymphomagenesis, because the mutant MYC proteins have altered functional interactions with p107 protein complexes and fail to be phosphorylated at Thr-58.