Expression and activation of B-Raf kinase isoforms in human and murine leukemia cell lines.

The B-raf/c-Rmil proto-oncogene belongs to the raf/mil family of serine/threonine protein kinases. It encodes multiple protein isoforms previously shown to be expressed predominantly in neural tissues. We report here that B-Raf proteins of 95 and 72 kDa are also expressed in various human and murine hematopoietic cell lines. Their relative level of expression is variable depending on the cell line examined. The highest level of expression of p95B-raf was found in UT-7 cells, a human pluripotent cell line established from a patient with a megakaryoblastic leukemia. These cells are able to differentiate toward erythroid or myeloid lineage phenotypes in presence of erythropoietin (EPO) or granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) respectively. We show that treatment of UT-7 cells with EPO, GM-CSF or stem cell factor (SCF) rapidly induces phosphorylation of p95B-raf as indicated by a shift of electrophoretic mobility. This increase in phosphorylation is correlated with a three-fold increase of B-Raf kinase activity. B-Raf activation also increases in a dose-dependent manner in response to EPO and GM-CSF. We also show that both p95B-raf and p72B-raf can be activated by IL-3 in murine BAF-3 pro-B cells and by anti-CD3 in human Jurkat cells, respectively. These observations provide the first evidence that the B-Raf kinase is involved in signal transduction pathways regulating proliferation and differentiation of hematopoietic cells of both myeloid and lymphoid lineages.