Physical interaction of Cdc28 with Cdc37 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

The Cdc37 protein in Saccharomyces cerevisiae is thought to be a kinase-targeting subunit of the chaperone Hsp90. In a genetic screen, four protein kinases were identified as interacting with Cdc37 - Cdc5, Cdc7, Cdc15 and Cak1. This result underlines the importance of Cdc37 for the folding of protein kinases. In addition, we showed that Ydj1, a yeast DnaJ homolog belonging to the Hsp40 family of chaperones, genetically interacts with Cdc37. No physical interaction has so far been detected between Cdc37 and Cdc28, although genetic interactions (synthetic lethality and mutation suppression), and biochemical studies have suggested that these two proteins functionally interact. We found that, when separately expressed, the N-terminal lobe of Cdc28 interacted strongly with the C-terminal moiety of Cdc37 in a two-hybrid system. This was not the case for the full-length Cdc28 protein. We present models to explain these results.