Prohibitin physically interacts with MCM proteins and inhibits mammalian DNA replication

Prohibitin, a tumor suppressor protein, has been shown to repress E2F-mediated transcription and arrest cell cycle progression. While prohibitin has been proposed to regulate cell cycle progression by repressing transcriptional targets of E2F1, it is not clear whether other mechanisms are also involved in mediating the growth arrest. Here we demonstrate that prohibitin can function as a potent inhibitor of DNA replication by interacting with members of Minichromosome maintenance complex of proteins (MCM2-7). The data presented here indicates that prohibitin can physically interact with MCM2, MCM5 and MCM7 in in vitro GST binding assays as well as in MCF-7 cells as seen by immunoprecipitation-western blot experiments. The association was cell cycle dependent, and more pronounced 4-8 hours after serum stimulation of quiescent cells. Prohibitin associated more robustly with MCM2 and MCM5 compared to MCM7, suggesting that prohibitin mainly interacts with the regulatory subunits of the MCM complex. Confirming these results, prohibitin was found to co-localize with MCM2, MCM5 and MCM7 in MCF-7 cells, as seen by double immunofluorescence experiments. Further, Prohibitin strongly inhibited DNA replication in an in vitro replication assay. These results strongly suggest that prohibitin effectively represses replication by interacting with the components of mammalian replication machinery and this might contribute to the growth regulatory properties of prohibitin.