The insulin receptor: a prototype for dimeric, allosteric membrane receptors?

The recent crystallographic structure of the insulin receptor (IR) extracellular domain has brought us closer to ending several decades of speculation regarding the stoichiometry and mechanism of insulin-receptor binding and negative cooperativity. It supports a bivalent crosslinking model whereby two sites on the insulin molecule alternately crosslink two partial-binding sites on each insulin-receptor half. Ligand-induced or -stabilized receptor dimerization or oligomerization is a general feature of receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs), in addition to cytokine receptors, but the kinetic consequences of this mechanism have been less well studied in other RTKs than in the IR. Surprisingly, recent studies indicate that constitutive dimerization and negative cooperativity are also ubiquitous properties of G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), which show allosteric mechanisms similar to those described for the IR.