Department of Medicinal and Analytical Chemistry, Genentech Inc., South San Francisco, California 94080.
Epidermal growth factor (EGF) domains are found in many proteins, particularly those of the coagulation/fibrinolytic system. We and others have demonstrated that tissue plasminogen activator (t-PA) and prourokinase are modified by the attachment of fucose to equivalent threonine residues within their EGF domains. Factor XII and protein C each contain two EGF domains; in both proteins, the EGF domain nearest the N terminus has a threonine residue in a position homologous to that which is fucosylated in t-PA. In protein C, this site is 3 residues from the position of another post-translational modification, beta-hydroxylation of Asp-71. We isolated peptides containing these sites to determine, primarily by mass spectrometric analysis, the presence of O-linked fucose and/or beta-hydroxyaspartate. We found that factor XII is fully fucosylated at Thr-90. Protein C is unmodified at the equivalent site (Thr-68) and is completely beta-hydroxylated at Asp-71. It has been recently reported that the first EGF domain of human factor VII has O-linked fucose at the equivalent position (Ser-60) (Bjoern, S., Foster, D. C., Thim, L., Wiberg, F. C., Christensen, M., Komiyama, Y., Pedersen, A. H., and Kisiel, W. (1991) J. Biol. Chem. 266, 11051-11057), while it is unmodified at Asp-63 despite having the consensus sequence for beta-hydroxylation at the latter site. These observations raise the possibility that O-linked fucosylation and beta-hydroxylation of EGF domains are mutually exclusive post-translational modifications.