Isolation and molecular characterization of the carboxy-terminal pdr3 mutants in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Multidrug resistance in Saccharomyces cerevisiae mainly results from the overexpression of genes coding for the membrane efflux pumps, the major facilitators and the ABC binding cassette transporters, under the control of key transcription regulators encoded by the PDR1 and PDR3 genes. Pdr3p transcriptional activator contains a weak activation domain near the N-terminal zinc finger, a central regulatory domain, and a strong activation domain near the carboxyl terminus. Here we report the results of the mutational analysis of the C-terminal region of Pdr3p. After in vitro mutagenesis of the PDR3 gene six single amino acid substitutions were identified and resulted in resistance to cycloheximide, sulfomethuron methyl, 4-nitroquinoline oxide, fluconazole, mucidin, chloramphenicol and oligomycin. All the C-terminal pdr3 mutant alleles also conferred multidrug resistance in the presence of the wild-type PDR3 gene. The pdr3 mutations resulted in overexpression of both the PDR3 and PDR5 genes as revealed by transactivation experiments involving the PDR3-lacZ and PDR5-lacZ fusion genes and Western blot analyses using antibodies against Pdr5p. Most of the C-terminal pdr3 mutations were found in two sequence stretches exhibiting a high degree of amino acid identity with Pdr1p indicating that they might play a significant role in protein-protein interactions during the initiation of transcription of genes involved in multidrug resistance.