Variations in the unstructured C-terminal tail of interferons contribute to differential receptor binding and biological activity.

Type I interferons (IFNs) elicit antiviral, antiproliferative and immunomodulatory properties in cells. All of them bind to the same receptor proteins, IFNAR1 and IFNAR2, with different affinities. While the 13 known IFNalphas are highly conserved, the C-terminal unstructured tail was found to have large variation in its net charge, from neutral to +4. This led us to speculate that the tail may have a role in modulation of the IFN biological activity, through fine-tuning the binding to IFNAR2. To evaluate this hypothesis, we replaced the tail of IFNalpha2 with that of IFNalpha8 and IFNbeta tails, or deleted the last five residues of this segment. Mutations to the more positively charged tail of IFNalpha8 resulted in a 20-fold higher affinity to IFNAR2, which results in a higher antiviral and antiproliferative activity. Double and multiple mutant cycle analysis placed the tail near a negatively charged loop on IFNAR2, comprising of residues Glu 132-134. Deleting the tail resulted in only twofold reduction in binding compared to the wild-type. Next, we modeled the location of the tail using a two-step procedure: first we generated 200 models of the tail docked on IFNAR2 using HADDOCK, second the models were scored according to the fit between experimentally determined rates of association of nine mutant complexes, and their calculated rates using the PARE software. From the results we suggest that the unstructured tail of IFNalpha is gaining a specific structure in the bound state, binding to a groove below the 132-134 loop in IFNAR2.