A Novel Glycosaminoglycan-binding Protein Is the Vertebrate Homologue of the Cell Cycle Control Protein, Cdc37

doi:10.1074/jbc.270.27.16198

A Novel Glycosaminoglycan-binding Protein Is the Vertebrate Homologue of the Cell Cycle Control Protein, Cdc37 (*)

From the (1)Department of Anatomy and Cellular Biology, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts 02111

^¶ To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel.: 617-636-6659; Fax: 617-636-0380.

↵^§ Present address: Institute for Molecular Science of Medicine, Aichi Medical University, Nagakute, Aichi 480-11, Japan.

Abstract

Using a monoclonal antibody, IVd4, that recognizes a novel group of hyaluronan-binding proteins, we have immunoscreened a cDNA library constructed from embryonic chick heart muscle mRNA. One of the cDNAs isolated from the library encodes a 29.3-kDa protein homologous to Cdc37, an essential cell cycle regulatory factor previously characterized genetically in yeast and Drosophila; this is the first vertebrate CDC37 gene to be cloned to date. We also present evidence for the existence of a second chick isoform that is identical to the 29.3-kDa protein over the first 175 amino acids but is entirely different at the carboxyl terminus and lacks the IVd4 epitope. The avian Cdc37 binds hyaluronan, chondroitin sulfate and heparin in vitro, and both isoforms contain glycosaminoglycan-binding motifs previously described in several hyaluronan-binding proteins. These findings suggest a role for glycosaminoglycans in cell division control.

Footnotes

↵* This work was supported by National Institutes of Health Grants DE05838 and HD23681 (to B. P. T.). The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore by hereby marked “advertisement” in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.

The nucleotide sequence(s) reported in this paper has been submitted to the GenBank/EMBL Data Bank with accession number(s) U20281 and U25026.
↵¹ The abbreviations used are:

GAG

glycosaminoglycan

bp

base pair

mAb

monoclonal antibody

nt

nucleotide

kb

kilobase

PAGE

polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis

PCR

polymerase chain reaction

RACE

rapid amplification of cDNA ends

IPTG

isopropyl-thiogalactoside.
↵² Q. Yu, K. Deyst, E. Goedecke, S. D. Banerjee, and B. P. Toole, unpublished data.