Abstract

The budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is a convenient system for coupling heterologous G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) to the pheromone response pathway to facilitate empirical ligand screening and/or GPCR mutagenesis studies. However, few studies have applied this system to define GPCR-G protein-coupling preferences and furnish information on ligand affinities, efficacies, and functional selectivity. We thus used different S. cerevisiae strains, each expressing a specific human Gα/yeast Gpa1 protein chimera, and determined the pharmacology of various ligands of the coexpressed human adenosine A₁ receptor. These assays, in conjunction with the application of quantitative models of agonism and antagonism, revealed that (−)-N⁶-(2-phenylisopropyl)adenosine was a high-efficacy agonist that selectively coupled to Gpa/1Gα_o, Gpa1/Gα_i1/2, and Gpa1/Gα_i3, whereas the novel compound, 5′-deoxy-N⁶-(endo-norborn-2-yl)-5′-(2-fluorophenylthio)adenosine (VCP-189), was a lower-efficacy agonist that selectively coupled to Gpa1/Gα_i proteins; the latter finding suggested that VCP-189 might be functionally selective. The affinity of the antagonist, 8-cyclopentyl-1,3-dipropylxanthine, was also determined at the various strains. Subsequent experiments performed in mammalian Chinese hamster ovary cells monitoring cAMP formation/inhibition, intracellular calcium mobilization, phosphorylation of extracellular signal-regulated kinase 1 and 2 or ³⁵S-labeled guanosine 5′-(γ-thio)triphosphate binding, were in general agreement with the yeast data regarding agonist efficacy estimation and antagonist affinity estimation, but revealed that the apparent functional selectivity of VCP-189 could be explained by differences in stimulus-response coupling between yeast and mammalian cells. Our results suggest that this yeast system is a useful tool for quantifying ligand affinity and relative efficacy, but it may lack the sensitivity required to detect functional selectivity of low-efficacy agonists.