Tyrosine 842 Residue in the Activation Loop of FLT3-ITD Is Indespensible for Oncogenic Transformation

The receptor tyrosine kinase FLT3 is mutated in around 30% of acute myeloid leukemia patients. The so-called internal tandem duplication (ITD) mutation in the juxtamembrane domain is the most common type of mutation in FLT3. Other oncogenic mutations include point mutations in the kinase domain. One of the hallmark of receptor activation is phosphorylation on several tyrosine residues in the receptor. Oncogenic FLT3 mutants display constitutive activity leading to aberrant cell proliferation and survival. Phosphorylation on several critical tyrosine residues is known to be essential for FLT3 signaling. The tyrosine residue Y842, which is located in the activation loop of FLT3, and is well conserved in all receptor tyrosine kinases. It has been demonstrated that tyrosine phosphorylation of the activation loop is essential for the activity of some but not all receptor tyrosine kinases. In this report we show that phosphorylation on Y842 residue is dispensable for receptor activity and stability. However, Y842 plays critical roles in oncogenic FLT3-ITD mediated transformation. We have shown that a Y-to-F mutation (Y842F) results in reduced cell viability and proliferation. This mutation also led to dramatic decrease in in vitro colony formation in semi-solid medium. Furthermore, cells carrying the Y842F mutant of FLT3-ITD displayed significant delay in tumor formation in nude mice. Gene expression analysis, using microarrays, showed that mutation of Y842 causes suppression of anti-apoptotic genes. Finally, we showed that phosphorylated Y842 is a binding site for SHP2 and mutation of this site results in impaired activation of signaling through the RAS/ERK pathway. Collectively, our data suggest that Y842 in FLT3 plays an important role in FLT3-mediated RAS/ERK signaling and cellular transformation.