New structural arrangement of the extracellular regions of the phosphate transporter SLC20A1, the receptor for gibbon ape leukemia virus.

Infection of a host cell by a retrovirus requires an initial interaction with a cellular receptor. For numerous gammaretroviruses, such as the gibbon ape leukemia virus, woolly monkey virus, feline leukemia virus subgroup B, feline leukemia virus subgroup T, and 10A1 murine leukemia virus, this receptor is the human type III sodium-dependent inorganic phosphate transporter, SLC20A1, formerly known as PiT1. Understanding the critical receptor functionalities and interactions with the virus that lead to successful infection requires that we first know the surface structure of the cellular receptor. Previous molecular modeling from the protein sequence, and limited empirical data, predicted a protein with 10 transmembrane helices. Here we undertake the biochemical approach of substituted cysteine accessibility mutagenesis to resolve the topology of this receptor in live cells. We discover that there are segments of the protein that are unexpectedly exposed to the outside milieu. By using information determined by substituted cysteine accessibility mutagenesis to set constraints in HMMTOP, a hidden Markov model-based transmembrane topology prediction method, we now propose a comprehensive topological model for SLC20A1, a transmembrane protein with 12 transmembrane helices and 7 extracellular regions, that varies from previous models and should permit approaches that define both virus interaction and transport function.