BACKGROUND: The existence of a Saccharomyces cerevisiae gene encoding a novel isoform of protein kinase C was reported recently in this journal. RESULTS: We demonstrate here that, firstly, the purported PKC2 gene does not reside at the chromosomal location to which it was assigned; secondly, it does not exist as a contiguous sequence in the S. cerevisiae genome; thirdly, some of its reported sequences do exist within other yeast genes; and fourthly, some of its reported sequences, encoding regions of the predicted protein related to protein kinase C, do not exist in any context in the yeast genome. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude from these studies that the PKC2 gene is a composite construction of unrelated yeast and non-yeast sequences.