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Molecular and Cellular Biology, May 2007, p. 3817-3827, Vol. 27, No. 10
0270-7306/07/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/MCB.02194-06
Copyright © 2007, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.

MEK1 and Protein Phosphatase 4 Coordinate Dictyostelium Development and Chemotaxis ^,

Michelle C. Mendoza,^1,2, Ezgi O. Booth,^3,4, Gad Shaulsky,^3,4 and Richard A. Firtel^1*

Section of Cell and Developmental Biology, Division of Biological Sciences, and Center for Molecular Genetics, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093-0380,¹ Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program, School of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093,² Graduate Program in Structural and Computational Biology and Molecular Biophysics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas 77030,³ Department of Molecular and Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas 77030⁴

Received 22 November 2006/ Returned for modification 22 January 2007/ Accepted 6 March 2007

The MEK and extracellular signal-regulated kinase/mitogen-activated protein kinase proteins are established regulators of multicellular development and cell movement. By combining traditional genetic and biochemical assays with a statistical analysis of global gene expression profiles, we discerned a genetic interaction between Dictyostelium discoideum mek1, smkA (named for its role in the suppression of the mek1^– mutation), and pppC (the protein phosphatase 4 catalytic subunit gene). We found that during development and chemotaxis, both mek1 and smkA regulate pppC function. In other organisms, the protein phosphatase 4 catalytic subunit, PP4C, functions in a complex with the regulatory subunits PP4R2 and PP4R3 to control recovery from DNA damage. Here, we show that catalytically active PP4C is also required for development, chemotaxis, and the expression of numerous genes. The product of smkA (SMEK) functions as the Dictyostelium PP4R3 homolog and positively regulates a subset of PP4C's functions: PP4C-mediated developmental progression, chemotaxis, and the expression of genes specifically involved in cell stress responses and cell movement. We also demonstrate that SMEK does not control the absolute level of PP4C activity and suggest that SMEK regulates PP4C by controlling its localization to the nucleus. These data define a novel genetic pathway in which mek1 functions upstream of pppC-smkA to control multicellular development and chemotaxis.

Published ahead of print on 12 March 2007.

Supplemental material for this article may be found at http://mcb.asm.org/.

These authors contributed equally.

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