Heat shock protein 90 as a critical factor in maintaining glucocorticosteroid receptor in a nonfunctional state.

Previous work demonstrated that the ligand binding domain (LBD) was required to determine the formation of the cytosolic, untransformed, inactive, 8 S, heterooligomeric form of the human glucocorticosteroid receptor (hGR) which includes the 90-kDa heat shock protein (hsp90) (Pratt, W.B., Jolly, D.J., Pratt, D.V., Hollenberg, S.M., Giguère, V., Cadepond, F.M., Schweizer-Groyer, G., Catelli, M.G., Evans, R.M., and Baulieu, E.E. (1988) J. Biol. Chem. 263, 267-273). Truncations of hGR deleting all or almost all of the LBD give GR derivatives in the non-hsp90-interacting 4 S form able to stimulate transcription in a hormone-independent manner. To identify the LBD subregion(s) involved in 8 S formation, we analyzed the sedimentation behavior of hGR mutants with various LBD internal deletions and/or truncations transiently expressed in cells that contain hsp90 but very low levels of endogenous GR, and we correlated the results with their transcriptional activity. LBD has been divided into three subregions: two of them, LBD1 (between amino acids 551 and 626) and LBD2 (between amino acids 627 and 696), include amino acid sequences highly conserved in the steroid receptor superfamily, and LBD3 consists of the carboxyl-terminal part of the molecule (amino acids 697-777). Each of these subregions can be deleted without impeding 8 S heterooligomer formation, and the corresponding receptors do not have transcriptional activity in the absence as well as in the presence of hormone. When linked to hGR mutants truncated after amino acids 532 or 550, each subregion does separately promote 8 S heterooligomeric complex formation and repress the intrinsic constitutive transcriptional activity of the truncated receptors. These 8 S complexes contain hsp90. In a control experiment, the linkage of 1,017 amino acids of beta-galactosidase to the carboxyl-terminal of 1-532 hGR gave a hybrid receptor still constitutively transcriptionally active which did not bind hsp90. These results provide evidence that there is a strong correlation between the association with hsp90 and the loss of GR functional properties and that hsp90 may play a critical role in maintaining the receptor in a nonfunctional state.