Rl. Wange et al., ACTIVATING AND INHIBITORY MUTATIONS IN ADJACENT TYROSINES IN THE KINASE DOMAIN OF ZAP-70, The Journal of biological chemistry, 270(32), 1995, pp. 18730-18733
ZAP-70 is a 70-kDa protein tyrosine kinase, expressed exclusively in T
cells and NK cells, and plays a critical role in mediating T cell act
ivation in response to T cell receptor engagement, The strong correlat
ion between tyrosine phosphorylation of ZAP-70 and its acquisition of
increased kinase activity suggests that it is positively regulated by
tyrosine phosphorylation, Previously, we identified tyrosines 492 and
493 of ZAP-70 as being sites of in vivo phosphorylation in response to
T cell receptor engagement, To determine the role of phosphorylation
in regulating ZAP-70 activity, we mutated each of these tyrosines indi
vidually to phenylalanine, When expressed in COS cells, Y493F-mutated
ZAP-70 demonstrated normal basal kinase activity, but, unlike wild typ
e ZAP-70, could not be activated by tyrosine phosphorylation induced b
y incubation with pervanadate or by co-expression of constitutively ac
tivated Lck, This suggests that Tyr-493 phosphorylation is required fo
r the tyrosine phosphorylation-induced activation of ZAP-70, The Y492F
mutation resulted in 4-fold higher basal kinase activity, which could
be stimulated further by tyrosine phosphorylation, These results reve
al that critical tyrosine residues in the kinase domain of ZAP-70 are
important in regulation of its catalytic activity.