Structure of the interferon-receptor complex determined by distance constraints from double-mutant cycles and flexible docking

The pleiotropic activity of type I interferons has been attributed to the specific interaction of IFN with the cell-surface receptor components ifnar1 and ifnar2. To date, the structure of IFN has been solved, but not that of the receptor or the complex. In this study, the structure of the IFN-α2–ifnar2 complex was generated with a docking procedure, using nuclear Overhauser effect-like distance constraints obtained from double-mutant cycle experiments. The interaction free energy between 13 residues of the ligand and 11 of the receptor was measured by double-mutant cycles. Of the 100 pairwise interactions probed, five pairs of residues were found to interact. These five interactions were incorporated as distance constraints into the flexible docking program prodock by using fixed and movable energy-gradient grids attached to the receptor and ligand, respectively. Multistart minimization and Monte Carlo minimization docking of IFN-α2 onto ifnar2 converged to a well-defined average structure, with the five distance constraints being satisfied. Furthermore, no structural artifacts or intraloop energy strain were observed. The mutual binding sites on IFN-α2 and ifnar2 predicted from the model showed an almost complete superposition with the ones determined from mutagenesis studies. Based on this structure, differences in IFN-α2 versus IFN-β binding are discussed.