The central hydrophobic domain of the bovine papillomavirus E5 transforming protein can be functionally replaced by many hydrophobic amino acid sequences containing a glutamine.

The 44-amino-acid E5 transforming protein of bovine papillomavirus can induce growth transformation of cultured rodent fibroblast cell lines. Previous studies revealed that efficient transformation of mouse C127 cells by the E5 protein required a central core of hydrophobic amino acids and several specific carboxyl-terminal amino acids. Although a randomly derived sequence of hydrophobic amino acids could functionally replace the wild-type hydrophobic core, most such sequences could not. We show here that the conserved glutamine at position 17 in the hydrophobic domain is also important for transformation and that insertion of the glutamine can rescue the transforming activity of many but not all otherwise defective mutants containing random hydrophobic sequences. However, a class of mutants was identified that transform efficiently even in the absence of glutamine, demonstrating that the presence of this amino acid is not absolutely required for efficient transformation. E5 proteins containing the glutamine appear to display increased homodimer formation compared with mutant proteins lacking the glutamine, but this amino acid has no apparent effect on protein stability.