Study of the higher eukaryotic gene function CDK2 using fission yeast

In the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, cdc2 function is required both in G1 to enter the cell cycle and in G2 to initiate mitosis. In higher eukaryotes, these functions appeared to be shared between several cdc2-like genes including CDK2. Temperature-sensitive mutations in S. pombe cdc2 that arrest the cell cycle in both G1 and G2 phases are not complemented by CDK2. We have used S. pombe to investigate what functions CDK2 can perform. We found that overexpression of the human homologue (HsCDK2) caused cell cycle arrest in G2/M showing that HsCDK2 interfered with mitotic events. Xenopus CDK2 (XlCDK2) overexpression did not cause cell cycle arrest and could rescue the G1 block but not the G2 block of a cdc2-M26 ts strain. A mutant XlCDK2-R33, which is inactive as a kinase, failed to rescue the G1 block, suggesting that the protein kinase activity of CDK2 is required to enter the cell cycle in these circumstances. We designed screens to select mutants that would require XlCDK2 expression for viability, hoping to isolate new gene functions interacting with, or that could be replaced by, XlCDK2 in G1, or new cdc2 mutants altered solely in their G1 role. From these screens several cell cycle mutants were selected that were XlCDK2-dependent. These were all cdc2 mutants altered only in their G2/M function. Therefore XlCDK2 can influence both the G1/S and G2/M transition points of cdc2 in S. pombe.