Activation of rat and human c-raf(-1) by rearrangement

Activated c-raf(-1) gene was found in three transformants obtained by transfecting DNAs from rat hepatocellular carcinoma, metastasis of human colon cancer in mesocolon and normal mucosa from a different colon cancer patient. Rat and human activated c-raf(-1) genes were cloned into cosmid vectors; restriction enzyme mapping revealed both activated c-raf(-1) genes to have rearrangement in the center of the normal form of the gene, and the upstream sequences were replaced by unrelated sequences. Using genomic DNA fragments located immediately downstream of the recombination points, the activations of all these c-raf(-1) were shown to have occurred during the transfection process. The recombination points in both the rat and human clones isolated were located in the intron between exons 7 and 8, and nucleotide sequencing around these recombination points showed there to be an inverted repeat which could be involved in inducing in vitro recombination. Nucleotide sequencing of rat and human c-raf(-1) cDNAs revealed the upstream sequences, recombined to the 3' half of c-raf(-1), to be expressed as fusion mRNAs; the production of fused proteins was predicted from a long open reading frame, which is in-frame with the kinase domain encoded from the 3' half of the c-raf(-1) gene. There is a cysteine clustering region in an N-terminal region of the c-raf(-1) product deduced from the nucleotide sequence, and this cysteine clustering region was found to be highly homologous to that present in an N-terminal region of protein kinase C, although, in the latter cysteine clusters are present in duplicate. From analogy with the activation mechanism of protein kinase C, the N-terminal region of serine/threonine kinase coded by the c-raf(-1) gene is suggested to be a regulatory part of the enzyme activity, and it proposed that the replacement or truncation of this regulatory part could be the mechanism whereby c-raf(-1) is activated.