1. Departments of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology and Cancer Biology
2. Departments of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, and Departments and Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, 44 Binney Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA

Correspondence to: Michael J. Eck¹ Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to M.J.E. (e-mail: Email: eck@red.dfci.harvard.edu).Atomic coordinates have been deposited with the Protein Data Bank (Brookhaven National Laboratory) under accession numbers 2cbl and 1b47.

Abstract

Cbl is an adaptor protein that functions as a negative regulator of many signalling pathways that start from receptors at the cell surface^{1, 2, 3, 4}. The evolutionarily conserved amino-terminal region of Cbl (Cbl-N) binds to phosphorylated tyrosine residues and has cell-transforming activity. Point mutations in Cbl that disrupt its recognition of phosphotyrosine also interfere with its negative regulatory function and, in the case of v-cbl, with its oncogenic potential⁵. In T cells, Cbl-N binds to the tyrosine-phosphorylated inhibitory site of the protein tyrosine kinase ZAP-70⁶. Here we describe the crystal structure of Cbl-N, both alone and in complex with a phosphopeptide that represents its binding site in ZAP-70. The structures show that Cbl-N is composed of three interacting domains: a four-helix bundle (4H), an EF-hand⁷ calcium-binding domain, and a divergent SH2 domain⁸ that was not recognizable from the amino-acid sequence of the protein. The calcium-bound EF hand wedges between the 4H and SH2 domains and roughly determines their relative orientation. In the ligand-occupied structure, the 4H domain packs against the SH2 domain and completes its phosphotyrosine-recognition pocket. Disruption of this binding to ZAP-70 as a result of structure-based mutations in the 4H, EF-hand and SH2 domains confirms that the three domains together form an integrated phosphoprotein-recognition module.