Requirement for kinase-induced conformational change in eukaryotic initiation factor 2α (eIF2α) restricts phosphorylation of Ser51
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As phosphorylation of eukaryotic translation initiation factor 2α (eIF2α) on Ser51 inhibits protein synthesis, cells restrict this phosphorylation to the antiviral protein kinase PKR and related eIF2α kinases. In the crystal structure of the PKR-eIF2α complex, the C-terminal lobe of the kinase contacts eIF2α on a face remote from Ser51, leaving Ser51 ∼ 20 Å from the kinase active site. PKR mutations that cripple the eIF2α-binding site impair phosphorylation; here, we identify mutations in eIF2α that restore Ser51 phosphorylation by PKR with a crippled substrate-binding site. These eIF2α mutations either disrupt a hydrophobic network that restricts the position of Ser51 or alter a linkage between the PKR-docking region and the Ser51 loop. We propose that the protected state of Ser51 in free eIF2α prevents promiscuous phosphorylation and the attendant translational regulation by heterologous kinases, whereas docking of eIF2α on PKR induces a conformational change that regulates the degree of Ser51 exposure and thus restricts phosphorylation to the proper kinases.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".