In eukaryotes, cell cycle progression is controlled by cyclin/cyclindependent kinase (CDK) pairs. To better understand the details of this process, it is necessary to dissect the CDK's substrate pool in a cyclin-and cell cycle stage-specific way. Here, we report a mass spectrometry-based method that couples rapid isolation of native kinase-substrate complexes to on-bead phosphorylation with heavy-labeled ATP O 4 ). This combined in vivo/in vitro method was developed for identifying cyclin/CDK substrates together with their sites of phosphorylation. We used the method to identify Clb5 (S-cyclin)/Cdc28 and Cln2 (G 1 /S-cyclin)/Cdc28 substrates during S phase in Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Cdc28 is the master CDK in budding yeast). During the work, we discovered that Clb5/Cdc28 specifically phosphorylates S429 in the disordered tail of Cdc14, an essential phosphatase antagonist of Cdc28. This phosphorylation severely decreases the activity of Cdc14, providing a means for modulating the balance of CDK and phosphatase activity.kinase substrate identification | NESKA D uring proliferation, a eukaryotic cell must faithfully replicate its genome and segregate the resulting genetic material equally into two progeny cells. A host of cellular events during this process must happen in a precisely ordered manner. Although it has been well established that cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs) constitute the primary driving force that order and coordinate these cell cycle events (1-3), the detailed picture of how CDK orchestrates the myriad cellular events during cell cycle progression remains to be fully elucidated. At different phases of the cell cycle, the CDKs associate with specific cyclins. These particular cyclin/CDK pairs preferentially phosphorylate sets of largely distinct substrates (4-7). To investigate this intricate relationship among cell cycle phase, cyclin/CDKs, and their substrates, it is necessary to dissect the CDK phosphorylated substrates in a cyclin-specific and cell cycle phase-specific manner. We report here a mass spectrometry-based native enzymesubstrate complex kinase assay (NESKA) that was developed to address this challenge. NESKA combines rapid isolation of native kinase-substrate complexes with on-bead phosphorylation using heavy labeled ATP within these complexes, providing sitespecific in vivo and in vitro phosphorylation information. It allows us to screen for specific cyclin-CDK substrates in a hypothesis-free manner within a chosen time window during cell cycle progression.We applied NESKA to investigate phosphorylation substrates of Clb5/Cdc28 during S-phase in budding yeast (Cdc28 encodes the main CDK in budding yeast; Clb5 is the major S-phase cyclin that specializes in the regulation of DNA synthesis; refs. 8-10). It has been shown that CDK phosphorylation of two proteins, Sld2 and Sld3, initiates DNA replication (11)(12)(13)(14). Here, we find that NESKA correctly identified a crucial phosphorylation site on Sld2 with Clb5/Cdc28. In addition, we discovered that Cdc14 is specifically phosphor...