Characterization of wild type and mutant glucocorticoid receptors from rat hepatoma and mouse lymphoma cells.

Using a combination of immunological blotting techniques and hormone affinity labeling, we have characterized the glucocorticoid receptors present in wild type and mutant rat hepatoma (HTC) and mouse thymoma (S49 and WEHI7) cells. Mutant HTC and WEHI7 cells of the receptorless phenotype, which contain greatly reduced amounts of glucocorticoid hormone binding activity, show parallel decreases in immunoreactive material using a monoclonal antibody raised against the rat liver glucocorticoid receptor. This indicates that these receptorless mutant cells harbor defects in either the production or accumulation of receptor protein. Quantitation of immunoreactivity and hormone binding activity present in wild type and mutant S49 cells indicates that these cells contain significantly more immunoreactive material than hormone binding activity. We conclude that S49 cells produce, in addition to their well characterized wild type or mutant receptors, a mutant receptor from a second allele which is of wild type size, is immunologically reactive, but is unable to bind hormone. The S49 mutant cell line nti (nuclear transfer increase) contains a glucocorticoid receptor which has a molecular weight of 40,000, while the wild type receptor has a molecular weight of 94,000. Affinity labeling of glucocorticoid receptors in nti cells with [3H]dexamethasone mesylate indicates that nti cells do not contain wild type sized precursor molecules which bind hormone, nor do they contain immunoreactive fragments of a molecular mass smaller than 94 kDa. It is proposed that the 40-kDa nti receptor is produced as a truncated protein most likely resulting from a nonsense mutation or from a truncated messenger RNA.