Tubulin tyrosylation in vivo and changes accompanying differentiation of cultured neuroblastoma-glioma hybrid cells.

Changes in a posttranslational modification of tubulin, which accompany differentiation, have been studied in neuroblastoma-glioma hybrid cultured cells. The modification consists of the reversible enzymatic addition of a tyrosine to the COOH terminus of the alpha chain. Cytoplasmic tubulin purified from undifferentiated cells resembled that from adult mammalian brain in that half was in a form which can not accept tyrosine; of the remainder, which is a substrate for tubulin-tyrosine ligase, a higher proportion had COOH-terminal tyrosine. In the tubulin from differentiated cells, in which there had been extensive assembly of axonal microtubules from a preformed pool of subunits, the nonsubstrate tubulin was almost entirely replaced by the species with COOH-terminal tyrosine. In living cells, in the absence of protein synthesis, there was fixation of labeled tyrosine into cytoplasmic alpha chains which was extensive enough to be consistent with turnover, during the course of an hour, of the pre-existing COOH-terminal tyrosine. The alpha chain in the particulate fraction of the cells was comparably labeled, along with some unidentified low molecular weight components.