Importance of extended protease substrate recognition motifs in steering BNIP-2 cleavage by human and mouse granzymes B

Background

Previous screening of the substrate repertoires and substrate specificity profiles of granzymes resulted in long substrate lists highly likely containing bystander substrates. Here, a recently developed degradomics technology that allows distinguishing efficiently from less efficiently cleaved substrates was applied to study the degradome of mouse granzyme B (mGrB).

Results

In vitro kinetic degradome analysis resulted in the identification of 37 mGrB cleavage events, 9 of which could be assigned as efficiently targeted ones. Previously, cleavage at the IEAD₇₅ tetrapeptide motif of Bid was shown to be efficiently and exclusively targeted by human granzyme B (hGrB) and thus not by mGrB. Strikingly, and despite holding an identical P4-P1 human Bid (hBid) cleavage motif, mGrB was shown to efficiently cleave the BCL2/adenovirus E1B 19 kDa protein-interacting protein 2 or BNIP-2 at IEAD₂₈. Like Bid, BNIP-2 represents a pro-apoptotic Bcl-2 protein family member and a potential regulator of GrB induced cell death. Next, in vitro analyses demonstrated the increased efficiency of human and mouse BNIP-2 cleavage by mGrB as compared to hGrB indicative for differing Bid/BNIP-2 substrate traits beyond the P4-P1 IEAD cleavage motif influencing cleavage efficiency. Murinisation of differential primed site residues in hBNIP-2 revealed that, although all contributing, a single mutation at the P3′ position was found to significantly increase the mGrB/hGrB cleavage ratio, whereas mutating the P1′ position from I₂₉?>?T yielded a 4-fold increase in mGrB cleavage efficiency. Finally, mutagenesis analyses revealed the composite BNIP-2 precursor patterns to be the result of alternative translation initiation at near-cognate start sites within the 5′ leader sequence (5′UTR) of BNIP-2.

Conclusions

Despite their high sequence similarity, and previously explained by their distinct tetrapeptide specificities observed, the substrate repertoires of mouse and human granzymes B only partially overlap. Here, we show that the substrate sequence context beyond the P4-P1 positions can influence orthologous granzyme B cleavage efficiencies to an unmatched extent. More specifically, in BNIP-2, the identical and hGrB optimal IEAD tetrapeptide substrate motif is targeted highly efficiently by mGrB, while this tetrapeptide motif is refractory towards mGrB cleavage in Bid.