The nature of amino acid 482 of human ABCG2 affects substrate transport and ATP hydrolysis but not substrate binding.

Several members of the ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporter superfamily, including P-glycoprotein and the half-transporter ABCG2, can confer multidrug resistance to cancer cells in culture by functioning as ATP-dependent efflux pumps. ABCG2 variants harboring a mutation at arginine 482 have been cloned from several drug-resistant cell lines, and these variants differ in their substrate transport phenotype. In this study, we changed the wild-type arginine 482 in human ABCG2 to each one of the 19 other standard amino acids and expressed each one transiently in HeLa cells.