Phosphorylation of H-ras proteins by protein kinase A

Protein phosphorylation is one of several representative post-translational modifications. Cyclic AMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA) plays the crucial and varying role of signal transduction. On the other hand, ras proteins plays an important role in cell proliferation and growth. Although a previous report showed that H-ras protein was phosphorylated by PKA, the stoichiometry was not determined, so we investigated the stoichiometry of phosphorylation of the protein by PKA. H-ras cDNA inserted into a pGEX-2T expressing vector produced high levels of recombinant H-ras (rH-ras) in a fusion protein with glutathione S-transferase. rH-ras was obtained after cleavage by thrombin. Phosphorylation of ras protein by the catalytic subunit of PKA was performed, and the radioactivity was counted after SDS-PAGE and autoradiography. The results indicate that less than 0.1 mol of phosphate was incorporated per mol of H-ras protein, and suggest that H-ras protein could not be a physiologically meaningful substrate for PKA.