Coiled-coil networking shapes cell molecular machinery

The highly abundant α-helical coiled-coil motif not only mediates crucial protein-protein interactions in the cell but is also an attractive scaffold in synthetic biology and material science and a potential target for disease intervention. Therefore a systematic understanding of the coiled-coil interactions (CCIs) at the organismal level would help unravel the full spectrum of the biological function of this interaction motif and facilitate its application in therapeutics. We report the first identified genome-wide CCI network in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which consists of 3495 pair-wise interactions among 598 predicted coiled-coil regions. Computational analysis revealed that the CCI network is specifically and functionally organized and extensively involved in the organization of cell machinery. We further show that CCIs play a critical role in the assembly of the kinetochore, and disruption of the CCI network leads to defects in kinetochore assembly and cell division. The CCI network identified in this study is a valuable resource for systematic characterization of coiled coils in the shaping and regulation of a host of cellular machineries and provides a basis for the utilization of coiled coils as domain-based probes for network perturbation and pharmacological applications.