And RbBP5. Ash2L and RbBP5 carbon atoms are highlighted in light green and yellow, respectively. Key hydrogen bonds are rendered as red dashed lines. For clarity, only a subset of interactions is shown. (B) Electrostatic potentials are contoured from 0 kbTe (red) to +10 kbTe (blue). (e) Charge of an electron; (kb) Bolzmann’s constant; (T) temperature in Kelvin. Zoomed view is on the positively charged cleft of Ash2L. (C) Schematic representation of the interactions stabilizing RbBP5 in to the Ash2L SPRY peptide-binding pocket. Yellow spheres represent RbBP5 residues. Ash2L residues making hydrogen bonds (filled boxes), hydrophobic contacts, or van der Waals contacts (empty boxes) with RbBP5 are rendered in blue. Hydrogen bonds are highlighted as orange dashed lines. For clarity, some interactions have been omitted from the figure.residues lining the base in the NPY Y4 receptor Agonist web Ash2LSPRY D/E-binding pocket and interacting with RbBP5 E347 and D353, respectively–with alanine severely impaired binding of RbBP5. Accordingly, enzymatic assays performed with the identical mutants resulted in an roughly fivefold reduction of MLL1 methyltransferase activity compared with wild-type Ash2L (Fig. 2B; Supplemental Fig. S3B). Mutation of Pro356 and Arg367, residues interacting with the hydrophobic bulge and E349 in the RbBP5 D/E box, resulted in sixfold and 13-fold reduction in binding, respectively. Accordingly, reconstitution on the complex using the Ash2L Pro356Ala and Arg367Ala mutants failed to RIPK3 Activator Purity & Documentation stimulate MLL1 methyltransferase activity to the similar extent as wild-type Ash2L, demonstrating that an Ash2L positively charged pocket lined by hydrophobic residues is essential for WRAD assembly and MLL1 methyltransferase activity (Fig. 2A,B).RbBP5 phosphorylation regulates H3K4 methylationof Flag-ASH2LTyr359Val, a mutant that exhibited activity related to Ash2LWT, restored H3K4me3 and b-globin gene expression levels related to Ash2LWT. Together, our findings strongly recommend that a functional Ash2L/ RbBP5 heterodimer is pivotal for maintaining the differentiation prospective of MEL cells. Phosphorylation of RbBP5 on S350 potentiates WRAD assembly MLL1 is tightly regulated by various mechanisms, which includes allosteric regulation by the WRAD complex (Dou et al. 2006), deposition of other post-translational modifications on histone proteins (Southall et al. 2009), and phosphorylation of MLL1 by ATR (Liu et al. 2010). In the RbBP5 D/E box (Supplemental Fig. S4), an evolutionarily conserved serine residue (S350) is found within the center in the Ash2L SPRY concave surface (Fig. 3A). Interestingly, 3 independent studies revealed that RbBP5 S350 is phosphorylated in vivo (Christensen et al. 2010; Phanstiel et al. 2011; Shiromizu et al. 2013). To ascertain the effect of RbBP5 phosphorylation on WRAD formation, we ectopically expressed constructs corresponding to either wild-type RbBP5 or an RbBP5 S350A mutant in fusion using a Flag tag in HEK293 cells. While we observed enrichment of Ash2L following immunoprecipitation of wild-type Flag-RbBP5, incubation of Flag-RbBP5 S350A with M2 agarose beads failed to coimmunoprecipitate Ash2L (Fig. 3B). Our findings that S350 does not make substantial interactions with Ash2L (Fig. 3C) and that its substitution to alanine impairs WRAD assembly recommend that maintaining the hydroxyl group on S350 is essential for high-affinity interaction in between Ash2L and RbBP5. We next applied ITC to identify the influence of S350 phosphorylation around the binding of RbBP5 to A.