Identification of two epidermal growth factor-sensitive tyrosine phosphorylation sites of phospholipase C-gamma in intact HSC-1 cells.

The 145-kDa phospholipase C isozyme, PLC-gamma, is an excellent substrate for the epidermal growth factor (EGF) receptor both in vivo and in vitro. We now demonstrate that EGF treatment of HSC-1 cells, a human squamous cell carcinoma-derived cell line that expresses high levels of the EGF receptor, rapidly induces tyrosine phosphorylation of two-thirds of the total cellular PLC-gamma pool. A two-step immunoaffinity protocol was used for large-scale isolation of phosphorylated PLC-gamma from the cytosol of EGF-treated HSC-1 cells. Phosphorylated PLC-gamma was digested with trypsin, then phosphotyrosine-containing peptides were purified by phosphotyrosine affinity chromatography and reverse-phase high performance liquid chromatography. The two major phosphotyrosine-containing tryptic peptides were sequenced. Comparison of the sequence data with the bovine brain PLC-gamma amino acid sequence indicated that the major, EGF-sensitive tyrosine phosphorylation sites of human PLC-gamma correspond to the bovine brain PLC-gamma tyrosine residues 771 and 1254. The former residue is adjacent to regions of PLC-gamma that contain high homology to the non-catalytic, amino-terminal region of the src tyrosine kinase. The latter residue lies near the carboxyl terminus of the PLC-gamma molecule. The accompanying manuscript (Kim J.W., Sim, S.S., Kim, U-H., Nishibe, S., Wahl, M. I., Carpenter, G., and Rhe, S. G. (1990) J. Biol. Chem. 265, 3940-3943) identifies these same 2 residues plus 2 additional tyrosine phosphorylation sites through large-scale in vitro phosphorylation of purified bovine brain PLC-gamma by the EGF receptor.