Thermodynamic analysis of progesterone receptor–promoter interactions reveals a molecular model for isoform-specific function

Human progesterone receptors (PR) exist as two functionally distinct isoforms, PR-A and PR-B. The proteins are identical except for an additional 164 residues located at the N terminus of PR-B. To determine the mechanisms responsible for isoform-specific functional differences, we present here a thermodynamic dissection of PR-A–promoter interactions and compare the results to our previous work on PR-B. This analysis has generated a number of results inconsistent with the traditional, biochemically based model of receptor function. Specifically, statistical models invoking preformed PR-A dimers as the active binding species demonstrate that intrinsic binding energetics are over an order of magnitude greater than is apparent. High-affinity binding is opposed, however, by a large energetic penalty. The consequences of this penalty are 2-fold: Successive monomer binding to a palindromic response element is thermodynamically favored over preformed dimer binding, and DNA-induced dimerization of the monomers is largely abolished. Furthermore, PR-A binding to multiple PREs is only weakly cooperative, as judged by a 5-fold increase in overall stability. Comparison of these results to our work on PR-B demonstrates that whereas both isoforms appear to have similar DNA binding affinities, PR-B in fact has a greatly increased intrinsic binding affinity and cooperative binding ability relative to PR-A. These differences thus suggest that residues unique to PR-B allosterically regulate the energetics of cooperative promoter assembly. From a functional perspective, the differences in microscopic affinities predict receptor–promoter occupancies that accurately correlate with the transcriptional activation profiles seen for each isoform