The kinase activity of SV40 large T antigen is mediated by a cellular kinase.

Large T antigen (large T) extracted from SV40-infected or transformed cells exhibits an in vitro protein kinase activity, whose origin and biological significance up to now had been obscure. We have addressed the questions of whether this activity is intrinsic to large T or arises by association with a cellular kinase, and, furthermore, whether this activity might play a biological role in vivo. Instead of analyzing large T from whole-cell lysates, where non-specific association of a cellular kinase(s) with large T might easily occur, we analyzed individual cellular subclasses of large T, isolated from their in vivo locations. In contrast to large T isolated from whole-cell lysates which was always kinase positive, none of the cellular subclasses of large T prepared by in situ fractionation of SV40-transformed mKSA cells exhibited detectable in vitro kinase activity. We could demonstrate that our fractionation conditions neither inactivated the large T-associated kinase activity nor dissociated it from large T when they were applied to kinase-positive large T isolated from whole-cell lysates. We conclude that large T does not contain an intrinsic kinase activity. This conclusion was further supported by our finding that it was possible to remove the large T-associated kinase activity from kinase-positive large T preparations and to reconstitute it by incubating the kinase-negative large T with cell lysates from various cell lines. Therefore, the simplest way of interpreting our results is that the in vitro kinase activity measured with large T preparations from whole-cell lysates is the result of an in vitro association of a cellular kinase(s) with large T during certain conditions of cell lysis.