www.impactjournals.com/oncotarget/ Oncotarget, Vol. 6, No.4 Mutation of Vav1 adaptor region reveals a new oncogenic activation Lyra Razanadrakoto1,2,*, Françoise Cormier3,4,5,*, Vanessa Laurienté1,2, Elisabetta Dondi1,2, Laura Gardano1,2, Shulamit Katzav6, Lionel Guittat1,2 and Nadine Varin- Blank1,2 1 INSERM, UMR 978, Bobigny, France 2 PRES SPC, Labex Inflamex, Université Paris 13, UFR SMBH, Bobigny, France 3 INSERM, UMR 1016, Institut Cochin, Paris, France 4 CNRS, UMR 8104, Paris, France 5 PRES SPC, Université Paris Descartes, Paris, France 6 The Hebrew University/ Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem, Israel * These authors share co-first authorship Correspondence to: Nadine Varin-Blank, email:
[email protected] Correspondence to: Lionel Guittat, email:
[email protected] Keywords: Vav1, β-catenin, Rac GTPase, Src-homology domains, adhesion complex, tumorigenesis Received: May 14, 2014 Accepted: October 23, 2014 Published: October 24 2014 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. ABSTRACT Vav family members function as remarkable scaffold proteins that exhibit both GDP/GTP exchange activity for Rho/Rac GTPases and numerous protein-protein interactions via three adaptor Src-homology domains. The exchange activity is under the unique regulation by phosphorylation of tyrosine residues hidden by intra-molecular interactions. Deletion of the autoinhibitory N-terminal region results in an oncogenic protein, onco-Vav, leading to a potent activation of Rac GTPases whereas the proto-oncogene barely leads to transformation. Substitution of conserved residues of the SH2-SH3 adaptor region in onco-Vav reverses oncogenicity.