Properties of the phosphorylated beta subunit of human choriogonadotropin

The beta subunit of human choriogonadotropin (hCG) was previously shown to be phosphorylated by beef skeletal muscle cAMP-dependent protein kinase (Keutmann, H. T., Ratanabanangkoon, K., Pierce, M. W., Kitzmann, K., and Ryan, R. J. (1983) J. Biol. Chem. 258, 14522-14527). The phosphorylation site was primarily at Thr 97, located within the "determinant loop" region proposed by Ward and Moore (Ward, D. N., and Moore, W. T. (1979) Animal Models for Research in Fertility and Contraception (Alexander, N. J., ed) pp. 151-164, Harper and Row, Baltimore, MD) to be important for hormonal activity and specificity. Biological and immunological studies were carried out to determine the effect of this modification on the activity of hCG. The phosphorylated hCG beta recombined with hCG alpha to form phosphorylated hCG (*hCG). The recombined *hCG retained full immunological activity in a radioimmunoassay using anti-hCG serum and 125I-hCG. The biological activities of the *hCG on appropriate rat gonadal cells, as studied by hCG radioreceptor assay, follitropin radioreceptor assay, and adenylate cyclase assay, were 0.29 +/- 0.04, 0.29 +/- 0.07, and 0.69 +/- 0.13 times as potent as hCG, respectively. The reduced receptor binding activity of *hCG was not due to dissociation of the hormone into its subunits. The far ultraviolet CD spectrum of the *hCG showed no gross conformational change induced by phosphorylation. We conclude the following: 1) Thr 97 is not involved in subunit-subunit interaction and is not part of the hCG antigenic site recognized by this particular antiserum; 2) Thr 97 does appear to participate in the hCG-receptor interactions; 3) modification of Thr 97 does not result in an enhancement of follitropin-like activity.