New & Noteworthy

The Cellular Hunger Games

November 07, 2013

We all know that it’s important to get enough vitamins in our diet. Scary-sounding conditions like scurvy, rickets, and beriberi can all happen when you don’t get enough of them.  And that’s not all.

Fairly recently, scientists discovered that when pregnant women get too little folate, their children are at a higher risk for neural tube defects. This connection is so strong that since 1998, the U.S. and Canada have successfully reduced the number of neural tube defects by adding extra folate to grain products.

While these kinds of effects are easy to see, it’s not always so obvious what is going on at the molecular level. But in a new study in GENETICS, Sadhu and coworkers showed that folate and methionine deficiencies can affect us right down to our DNA. And of course, they figured this out by starting with our little friend S. cerevisiae.

Folate and its related compound methionine are pretty important molecules in cellular metabolism. You need folate to make purine nucleotides, and it is essential for keeping just the right levels of methionine in a cell.

And methionine is, of course, one of the essential amino acid building blocks of proteins. But it is more than that. It’s also the precursor for S-adenosyl-methionine (SAM), which provides the methyl groups for protein methylation.

Protein methylation is a big deal for all sorts of things.  But one of its most important jobs is undoubtedly controlling levels of gene expression through methylation of histones.   

Since folate or methionine deficiency should affect SAM levels, in principle they could affect histone methylation too. But so far this connection had never been shown directly. Sadhu and colleagues set out to see what happens when you deprive S. cerevisiae of these nutrients.

Unlike humans, yeast can synthesize both folate and methionine. So the first step was to make folate- and methionine-requiring strains by deleting the FOL3 or MET2 genes, respectively. These mutant yeast strains couldn’t grow unless they were fed folate or methionine.

Now it was possible to starve these mutant strains by giving them low levels of the nutrients they needed. Starvation for either folate or methionine caused the methylation of a specific lysine residue (K4) of histone H3 to be reduced. Not only that, but expression of specific genes was lower, consistent with their reduced histone methylation.

To see how general this effect was, the authors performed essentially the same experiments in Schizosaccharomyces pombe, which is about as evolutionarily distant from S. cerevisiae as you can get and still be a yeast. In this beast, methionine deficiency also reduced histone methylation. For unknown reasons, folate deficiency didn’t have a significant effect. 

Sadhu and coworkers wondered whether this effect was so general that they could even see it in human cells. Since humans are folate and methionine auxotrophs, this experiment was easier to set up. When they grew human cells with starvation levels of folate or methionine, their histone methylation and gene expression were both reduced. So starvation conditions have an impact right down to the level of gene expression, across a wide range of organisms.

The simple explanation for this effect would be that reduced folate leads to reduced SAM levels, and therefore fewer methyl groups are available to modify histones. But the researchers got a surprise when they measured intracellular SAM levels in S. cerevisiae under the starvation conditions: they were the same as in wild type! This conclusion was so surprising that they tried two different, sophisticated methods, but both gave the same result.

They explain this by postulating a kind of metabolic triage.  Basically, the cell maintains a certain level of SAM in the cell but there is a pecking order for who gets to use it.  At very low nutrient levels, the cell uses the available folate or methionine for the most essential processes such as purine synthesis or translation, and sacrifices histone methylation. As more nutrients become available, then other less critical functions can use them.

This kind of triage might provide an explanation for the link between folate deficiency and neural tube defects, and also for the effectiveness of antifolates against cancer. And it adds to the growing body of evidence that environmental conditions such as famine can have effects that persist across generations. This is an important reminder that any decisions we make today about feeding the hungry could have consequences that reach far into the future.

by Maria Costanzo, Ph.D., Senior Biocurator, SGD

Categories: Research Spotlight

Tags: folate, methylation, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, starvation

How Yeast May One Day Help Michael J. Fox

October 31, 2013

Folks, yeast has been on a roll lately with regard to helping to understand and finding treatments for human disease. Last week we talked about how synthetic lethal screens may find new, previously unrecognized druggable targets for cancer. And this week it is Parkinson’s disease.

Now of course yeast can’t get the traditional sort of Parkinson’s disease …it doesn’t have a brain.  But it shares enough biology with us that when it expresses a mutant version of α-synuclein (α-syn) that is known to greatly increase a person’s risk for developing Parkinson’s disease, the yeast cell shows many of the same phenotypes as a diseased neuron.  The yeast acts as a stand-in for the neuron.

In a new study out in Science, Tardiff and coworkers use this yeast model to identify a heretofore unknown target for Parkinson’s disease in a sort of reverse engineering process. They screened around 190,000 compounds and looked for those that rescued toxicity in this yeast model. They found one significant hit, an N-aryl-benzimidazole (NAB) compound. Working backwards from this hit they identified its target as Rsp5p, a Nedd4 E3 ubiquitin ligase. 

The authors then went on to confirm this finding in C. elegans and rat neuron models where this compound halted and even managed to reverse neuronal damage. And for the coup de grace, Chung and coworkers showed in a companion paper that the compound worked in human neurons too. But not just any human neurons.

The authors used two sets of neurons derived from induced pluripotent cells from a single patient.  One set of neurons had a mutation in the α-syn gene which is known to put patients at a high risk of Parkinson’s disease-induced dementia.  The other set had the mutation corrected.  The compound they identified in yeast reversed some of the effects in the neurons with the α-syn mutation without significantly affecting the corrected neurons.  Wow.

What makes this even more exciting is that many people thought you couldn’t target α-syn with a small molecule. But as the studies here show, you can target an E3 ubiquitin ligase that can overcome the effects of mutant α-syn.  It took an unbiased screen in yeast to reveal a target that would have taken much, much longer to find in human cells. 

The mutant α-syn protein ends up in inclusion bodies that disrupt endosomal traffic in the cell.  The NAB compound that the authors discovered restored endosomal transport and greatly decreased the numbers of these inclusion bodies.  Juicing up Rsp5 seemed to clear out the mutant protein.

The next steps are those usually associated with finding a lead compound—chemical modification to make it safer and more effective, testing in clinical trial and then, if everything goes well, helping patients with Parkinson’s disease.  And that may not be all.

The α-syn protein isn’t just involved in Parkinson’s disease.  The dementia associated with this protein is part of a larger group of disorders called dementia with Lewy bodies that affects around 1.3 million people in the US.  If everything goes according to plan, many of these patients may one day thank yeast for their treatment.

by D. Barry Starr, Ph.D., Director of Outreach Activities, Stanford Genetics

Categories: Research Spotlight, Yeast and Human Disease

Tags: alpha-synuclein, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, ubiquitin ligase, yeast model for human disease

Using Yeast to Find Better Cancer Treatments

October 24, 2013

Current cancer treatments are a lot like trying to destroy a particular red plate by letting a bull loose in a china shop.  Yes, the plate is eventually smashed, but the collateral damage is pretty severe.

Ideally we would want something a bit more discriminating than an enraged bull.  We might want an assassin that can fire a single bullet that destroys that red plate. 

One way to identify the assassin that can selectively find and destroy cancer cells is by taking advantage of the idea of synthetic lethal mutations.  “Synthetic lethal” is a genetic term that sounds a lot more complicated than it really is.  Basically the idea is that mutating certain pairs of genes kills a cell, although mutating each gene by itself has little or no effect.

A synthetic lethal strategy seems tailor made for cancer treatments.  After all, a big part of what happens when a cell becomes cancerous is that it undergoes a series of mutations.  If scientists can find and target these mutated genes’ synthetically lethal partners, then the cancer cell will die but normal cells will not.

This is just what Deshpande and coworkers set out to do in a new study in the journal Cancer Research.  They first scanned a previous screen that looked at 5.4 million pairwise interactions in the yeast S. cerevisiae to find the best synthetic lethal pairs. They found 116,000 pairs that significantly affected cell growth only if both genes in the pair were mutated.

A deeper look into the data revealed that 24,000 of these pairs had human orthologs for both genes. In 500 of these pairs, at least one of the partner genes had been shown to be mutated in certain cancers. Using a strict set of criteria (such as the strength and reproducibility of the synthetic lethal effect, and the presence of clear one-to-one orthology between yeast and human), the authors narrowed these 500 down to 21 pairs that they decided to study in mammalian cell lines.

When the authors knocked down the expression of both genes in these 21 gene pairs in a mammalian cell line, they found six that significantly affected growth.  They focused the rest of the work on the strongest two pairs, SMARCB1/PMSA4 and ASPSCR1/PSMC2.  These mammalian gene pairs correspond to the yeast orthologs SNF5/PRE9 and UBX4/RPT1, respectively.

The authors identified two separate cancer cell lines that harbored mutated versions of the SMARCB1 gene.  When this gene’s synthetic lethal partner, PMSA4, was downregulated in these cancer lines, the growth of each cell line was severely compromised. The same was not true for a cell line that had a wild type version of SMARCB1—this cell line was not affected by downregulating PMSA4.  The authors used a synthetic lethal screen in yeast to identify a new cancer target which when downregulated selectively killed the cancer without killing “normal” cells.

This proof of principle set of experiments shows how the humble yeast may one day speed up the process of finding cancer treatments without all those nasty side effects (like vomiting, hair loss, anemia and so on).  Yeast screens can first be used to identify target genes and then perhaps also to find small molecules that affect the activity of those gene products.  Yeast may one day tame the raging bull in a china shop that is current cancer treatments.

by D. Barry Starr, Ph.D., Director of Outreach Activities, Stanford Genetics

Categories: Research Spotlight, Yeast and Human Disease

Tags: cancer, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, synthetic lethal

A GLAMorous New Role for Prefoldin

October 17, 2013

The prefoldin complex seemed like an ordinary housekeeper. It sat in the cytoplasm and folded protein after protein, just as Cinderella spent her days folding laundry for her stepsisters.

In the old story, the handsome prince searched the kingdom for a girl whose foot would fit the glass slipper. Using this crude screen, he finally found Cinderella and revealed her to be the true princess that she was.

In a new study, Millán-Zambrano and coworkers did essentially the same thing for the prefoldin complex.  They searched the genome of S. cerevisiae for new mutations that would affect transcription elongation. They found the prefoldin complex subunit PFD1 and went on to establish that in addition to its humdrum cytoplasmic role, prefoldin has a surprising and glamorous role in the nucleus facilitating transcriptional elongation.

The researchers decided to cast a wide net in their search for genes with previously undiscovered roles in transcriptional elongation. Their group had already worked out the GLAM assay (Gene Length-dependent Accumulation of mRNA), which can uncover elongation defects.

The assay uses two different reporter gene constructs that both encode Pho5p, an acid phosphatase. One generates an mRNA of average length, while the other generates an unusually long mRNA when fully transcribed. The acid phosphatase activity of Pho5p is simple to measure, and correlates well with abundance of its mRNA. If there is a problem with transcriptional elongation in a particular mutant strain, there will be much less phosphatase activity generated from the longer form than from the shorter one. So the ratio of the two gives a good indication of how well elongation is working in that mutant strain.

Millán-Zambrano and coworkers used this assay to screen the genome-wide collection of viable deletion mutants. They came up with mutations in lots of genes that were already known to affect transcriptional elongation, confirming that the assay was working. They also found some genes that hadn’t been shown to be involved in elongation before.  One of these was PFD1, a gene encoding a subunit of the prefoldin complex. As this deletion had one of the most significant effects on elongation, they decided to investigate it further.

Prefoldin is a non-essential complex made of six subunits that helps to fold proteins in the cytoplasm as they are translated. The authors tested mutants lacking the other subunits and found that most of them also had transcriptional elongation defects in the GLAM assay, although none quite as strong as the pfd1 mutant.

Since prefoldin is important in folding microtubules and actin filaments, the researchers wondered whether the GLAM assay result was the indirect effect of cytoskeletal defects. They were able to rule this out by showing that drugs that destabilize the cytoskeleton didn’t affect the GLAM ratio in wild-type cells, and that mutations in prefoldin subunits didn’t confer strong sensitivity to those drugs.

If prefoldin has a role in transcription, it would obviously need to get inside the nucleus. It had previously been seen in the cytoplasm, but when the authors took another look, they found it in the nucleus as well. Furthermore, Pfd1p was bound to the chromatin of actively transcribed genes! And besides its effect on transcription elongation, the pfd1 mutant has lower levels of RNA polymerase II occupancy and abnormal patterns of histone binding on transcribed genes.

There’s still a lot of work to be done to figure out exactly what prefoldin is doing during transcriptional elongation. Right now, the evidence points to its involvement in evicting histones from genes in order to expose them for transcription. But even before all the details of this story are worked out, this is a good reminder never to assume that an everyday housekeeper is only that.

With the right screen we can find new and exciting things about the most humdrum of characters. A glass slipper screen revealed the princess under that apron and chimney soot. And a GLAM assay revealed the sexy, exciting transcription elongation factor that is prefoldin.

by Maria Costanzo, Ph.D., Senior Biocurator, SGD

Categories: Research Spotlight

Tags: prefoldin, RNA polymerase II, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, transcription elongation

Yeast Winnows Down GWAS Hits in Autism

October 10, 2013

Cheap and easy genome sequencing has been both a blessing and a curse. We are able to find an incredible wealth of variation, but for the most part we have no easy way to tell whether a difference might contribute to a disease or not.

The poster child for this problem is autism. Lots of genome wide association studies (GWAS) have been done and lots of rare variants in lots of different genes have been found – unfortunately, way too many to pick out the ones that really matter.

Luckily our friend yeast can help. Various researchers have identified a number of variants in the human cation/proton antiporter gene NHE9 that associate with autism. In a new study, Kondapalli and coworkers used the NHE9 ortholog NHX1 from S. cerevisiae as an initial screen to identify which variants impact the activity of the NHE9 protein. They found that two of the three mutations they looked at compromised the activity of yeast Nhx1p.

They then set out to confirm these results in mammalian cells.  When they looked at protein activity in glial cells, they found that all three mutations compromised the activity of NHE9.  This is obviously different from what they found in yeast.

Now this doesn’t mean that yeast is useless for this approach (God forbid!).  No, instead it means that it is probably only useful for a subset of autism mutations.  Kondapalli and coworkers had suspected this, but apparently the subset is smaller than they initially thought.

The first thing they did was to generate a rough three dimensional map of the NHE9 protein in order to see which parts the two proteins shared.  The idea is that they could then do a quick screen in yeast with mutations that affect the shared structure.

While the structure of NHE9 has not been solved, we do have the structure of its distant bacterial relative, NhaA.  Kondapalli and coworkers aligned the two along with the yeast ortholog Nhx1p and identified conserved regions.

Three of the NHE9 mutations associated with autism—V176I, L236S, and S438P—were all predicted to be in shared, membrane-spanning parts of the protein.  The researchers introduced the equivalent mutations into NHX1—V167I, I222S, and A438P. 

 A yeast deleted for NHX1 grows poorly in high salt and low pH and also has increased sensitivity to hygromycin B, as compared to a yeast with a functioning NHX1.  Two of the mutant genes, carrying A438P or I222S, failed to rescue these growth defects.  The other mutant gene, with the V167I change, worked as well as wild type NHX1 at rescuing the yeast.  So at least in yeast, two of the three mutations appear to impact protein activity.

The next step was to see if the same was true in mammals.  Easier said than done!  Ideally they would want to investigate whether these mutations affected the protein in the cells where NHE9 is usually active.  Too bad no one knows this protein’s natural habitat.  This is why the researchers starting slicing mouse brains to figure out when and where the protein is expressed.

While we don’t have time or space to go into all the details here, Kondapalli and coworkers found that when and where in the brain NHE9 was expressed made sense as far as a possible contribution to autism.  They also found that glial cells had about 1.2 fold more NHE9 transcripts than did neuronal cells.  They therefore did their assays of protein activity in a type of glial cells called astrocytes.

While they couldn’t completely knock out NHE9 in mouse astrocytes, they were able to knock down its expression by over 80%.  When they added back the mutant NHE9 genes, they found that all three failed to mimic the effect of adding back wild type NHE9 to these cells.  This is different than what they found in yeast, where only two of the mutations impacted protein activity. 

When they went back to their 3D model, they saw that the mutation that differed, V167I, affected a less defined part of the structure.  This points to the fact that for the quick yeast screen to work, they need to be looking at parts of the protein where the structure is shared between the yeast and the human version.  In a perfect world they would have had crystal structures of each to work off of instead of having to kludge together a model.

In any event, this is the first step towards validating yeast as a quick screen for identifying mutations that can impact protein activity and so are good candidates for being involved in disease.  Yeast may help scientists separate the wheat from the chaff of GWAS and so help figure out how diseases happen and maybe help find treatments or even cures.  Well done yeast.

by D. Barry Starr, Ph.D., Director of Outreach Activities, Stanford Genetics

Categories: Research Spotlight, Yeast and Human Disease

Tags: autism, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, yeast model for human disease

Getting Into Yeast’s Genes

September 26, 2013

Yeast has been responsible for a lot of hook ups in its day (think beer goggles and margaritas on the beach).  Now it is payback time.  In a new study, Giraldo-Perez and Goddard have figured out how to make yeast more promiscuous.

No, they don’t get the yeast drunk.  Instead, they found that strains containing VDE, a homing endonuclease gene (HEG), entered meiosis more often than genetically identical strains that lacked VDE.  The yeast that contained this “selfish” gene (well, actually intein) were ready to go haploid more often than those that didn’t.

VDE and its ilk are said to be selfish because they end up getting passed down to more offspring than a certain Austrian monk might have predicted.  When a diploid is heterozygous for an HEG, the homing endonuclease cuts the sister chromosome at the equivalent spot. Then, when the diploid undergoes meiosis, the sister is repaired through recombination causing both chromosomes to contain the VDE gene.  Now instead of two spores containing VDE, all four will.

Giraldo-Perez and Goddard monitored the percentage of sporulating cells over a 30 day period and found that after five days, a higher percentage of diploids homozygous for VDE sporulated compared to diploids heterozygous for or lacking VDE.  The authors contend that under the right conditions, this increased sporulation would allow VDE to spread through a population 20 times faster than it might otherwise.  And the authors found that VDE needs something like this or it might disappear.

Like alcohol, VDE isn’t all lowered inhibitions and good times.  For example, yeast homozygous for VDE grow significantly more slowly than do yeast lacking VDE in YPD, grape juice, vineyard soil, vine bark (heterozygotes fall in between).  This obviously puts yeast carrying VDE at a disadvantage, meaning that if it didn’t have another trick up its sleeve, it would dwindle away to nothing.  That trick is speeding up sporulation. 

The authors weren’t able to determine why this little bit of DNA can have such a profound effect on the growth rate of yeast.  It is almost certainly too little DNA to affect the time it takes the yeast to copy its DNA.  And the endonuclease itself is probably not randomly nicking the chromosomal DNA in the mitotic state, since it is kept out of the nucleus by host encoded karyopherins.

So VDE is a truly a parasitic selfish gene.  It is parasitic because it sucks a little of the life out of a yeast cell.  And it is selfish because way more daughters end up with it than might be predicted.  Sounds like a nice description for many drunk people…

by D. Barry Starr, Ph.D., Director of Outreach Activities, Stanford Genetics

Categories: Research Spotlight

Tags: homing endonuclease, intein, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, selfish gene, VDE

Have Your Fuel and Eat It Too

September 19, 2013

Back in 2008 and 2011 there were huge spikes in the cost of food that caused riots in various parts of the world.  These things were pretty bad and one of our favorite beast’s best products, ethanol, may have been at least partly to blame.  In an attempt to deal with global warming, governments had created incentives that made it more lucrative to turn food into ethanol to power cars rather than keeping it as food to feed people.  The law of unintended consequences reared its ugly head and caused food prices to rise high enough to be unaffordable by the very poor.   

This situation arose because right now, pretty much the only commercially viable way to make ethanol is to use sugars like those found in sugar cane or starches like those found in corn.  Ultimately this won’t be a problem once scientists learn to coax yeast or other microorganisms to make ethanol out of agricultural waste.  Until then, though, one way to lessen the impact of ethanol production on food supplies might be to engineer a yeast strain that can more efficiently turn sugars into ethanol. 

One of the most inefficient parts of yeast fermentation is that the silly thing converts anywhere from 4-10% of the sugars it gets into glycerol instead of ethanol.   In a new study, Guadalupe-Medina and coworkers have engineered a strain of yeast that produces 60% less glycerol and 8% more ethanol than other commercial strains.  If they can scale this up, it might help us feed both the world’s population and our cars.

It has been known for some time that yeast end up making glycerol during fermentation because of redox-cofactor balancing issues.  In essence, the excess NADH that is made in fermentation reactions is reoxidized by converting part of the sugar into glycerol.  One obvious way to get less glycerol would be to give the yeast some other way to reoxidize its NADH. 

Guadalupe-Medina and coworkers decided to persuade yeast to use carbon dioxide instead of sugars.  Not only would this make sugar use more efficient, but their particular plan would also convert that carbon dioxide into a precursor that could be shunted into the ethanol producing pathway.  Theoretically the yeast should now increase its ethanol production both by wasting less sugar on glycerol and by turning carbon dioxide into ethanol.  And it turns out that this idea actually worked in practice.

The first step was to introduce the Rubisco enzyme into the yeast.  Rubisco (ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase oxygenase) is really one of the key enzymes in life…it provides the foundation for almost all life on the planet by fixing carbon dioxide from the air into ribulose-1,5 phosphate.  But that isn’t the important point here.  No, the key point for this work is that in the process of doing this, the enzyme oxidizes NADH.  By putting Rubisco in yeast, the yeast should now be able to reoxidize its NADH without making useless glycerol.

Of course this is easier said than done!  Rubisco is multi-subunit in most beasts and persnickety to boot.  But with a bit of work, they managed to get Saccharomyces cerevisiae to express a working copy of Rubisco.

So they would only have to introduce a single gene, the authors used the single subunit enzyme from T. dentrificans. As expected, this gene alone was not enough.  They knew from previous work that Rubisco would not work in yeast without the help of a couple of E. coli chaperones, groEL and groES.  When they expressed all three genes at the same time, they got Rubisco to fix carbon dioxide in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.  

The next step was to introduce the enzyme phosphoribulokinase (PRK) so that the ribulose-1,5 phosphate could be converted into 3-phosphoglycerate, a precursor in the ethanol pathway.  Luckily this was much easier than Rubisco and worked on the first try.  They had now engineered a Frankenyeast that should be able to make more ethanol and less glycerol.

When they tested the new strain, Guadalupe-Medina and coworkers found they had indeed engineered a more efficient yeast.  In anaerobic chemostat conditions, this yeast made 68% less glycerol and 11% more ethanol than the usual commercial strain.  They obtained similar results, 60% less glycerol and 8% more ethanol, in batch fermentations.  They had succeeded in improving an already awesome beast.

If this strain works on an industrial scale and if commercial producers all used this strain instead of the ones they currently use, the authors calculate we could get an extra 5 billion liters of ethanol added to the 110 billion we are already making.  That might just be enough to tide us over until scientists come up with a way to make ethanol commercially from non-food sources.

by D. Barry Starr, Ph.D., Director of Outreach Activities, Stanford Genetics

Categories: Research Spotlight

Tags: biofuel, Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Parthenogenesis, Saccharomyces Style

September 10, 2013

Parthenogenesis is one of the cooler things in biology. When a female Komodo dragon can’t find a mate, her eggs simply double their DNA and voila, a whole litter of female Komodo dragons is born. (Interestingly, they aren’t clones of mom…)

Now, this doesn’t work in mammals like us (curse you imprinting!), but something similar can happen in yeast. Given the right conditions and the right mutations, yeast can go from haploid to diploid without all that messy mating.

In a new study out in GENETICS, Schladebeck and Mösch uncover the newest mutation to be shown to cause whole genome duplication (WGD) in haploid Saccharomyces cerevisiae: the whi3 deletion. And this mutant is no slouch…the haploid will go diploid in no time flat if given the right conditions.

Schladebeck and Mösch looked at the stability of the haploid state of the whi3 mutant in both minimal and rich media, either in liquid culture or on solid agar. They generated fresh whi3 deletion strains and then followed them in each of these growth conditions for 72 days, passaging them every two days. 

What they found was that the haploid state was actually pretty stable in liquid culture using minimal media. They found very few diploid cells after 72 days. The same was not true for the other growth conditions.

On solid minimal media and liquid rich medium, there was a complete switch after 72 days. And on solid rich medium, the cells were all diploid after only 14 days. Genome duplication appeared to stop at the diploid level though. Even after 72 days on solid rich media there was no sign of tetraploids.

The authors next set out to figure out why deleting WHI3 had such a profound impact on haploid stability. They have not yet figured out everything that is going on, but they did uncover some interesting clues.

First they looked at the protein Nip100p. They already knew that NIP100 interacted genetically with WHI3, and that a nip100 deletion mutation affected chromatid separation. They found that Nip100p levels were significantly reduced when WHI3 was deleted, and even more so when the whi3 mutant strain was grown on solid rich medium. These are the conditions that most favored the transition from haploid to diploid. This suggests that NIP100 might be a key player in maintaining the haploid state.

The authors also compared transcriptional profiles of the wild type haploid strain, the whi3 deletion in a haploid background, and the whi3 homozygous mutant diploid. One of the findings from these experiments was that most of the genes involved in the yeast cohesion complex were upregulated in the absence of WHI3. Since this complex is required for sister chromatid cohesion, the idea would be that inefficient separation of chromatids in the whi3 mutant would increase the rate of whole genome duplication.

One of the as yet unexplained aspects of all of this is why the diploid state remains stable. There was no difference between the haploid and diploid deletion strains with regard to either Nip100p levels or transcription of cohesion-relate4d genes – the cohesins were upregulated in both and Nip100p was reduced in both.

One idea Schladebeck and Mösch put forth is that the diploid state isn’t inherently stable in this mutant. Instead, they do not see tetraploids simply because tetraploids have decreased viability. They appear but are quickly outcompeted by their diploid sisters.

The discovery about WHI3’s role in controlling ploidy is just one aspect of this new study. The authors also found important new information about the central regulatory role of WHI3 in cell division and biofilm formation.

The finding about ploidy control is important because maintaining haploid and diploid status is obviously a big deal: you don’t want to switch willy nilly from one to the other. And many pathogenic fungi, such as Candida albicans, change the organization of their genomes to adapt to changing growth conditions in their human hosts. They have WHI3 homologs, so these results could lead to better ways to cure fungal infections. Just one more example of how basic research can lead scientists to stumble on unexpected but ultimately important results…

by D. Barry Starr, Ph.D., Director of Outreach Activities, Stanford Genetics

Categories: Research Spotlight

Tags: ploidy, Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Smoothing Over an Extra Chromosome

August 22, 2013

Let’s say you had a rock you had to move that was way too heavy for you to lift. You could either start lifting weights until you could move it yourself or get someone to help you. Most of us would start texting our friends pretty quick.

Turns out our friend S. cerevisiae can be the same way. Many strains of this yeast can exist as either a fluffy colony or a smooth one. In a new study, Tan and coworkers show that some of these strains switch between the two by gaining or losing one of their chromosomes. They’d rather “get” an extra chromosome than try to gain a mutation that activates the necessary gene(s).

In this study, the authors found a strain where around one in a thousand yeast switched between fluffy and smooth colonies. As the smooth colonies grew, they developed “blebs” – little bumps on the smooth colonies.  Turns out these were yeast that switched back to the fluffy morphology.  The authors set out to explore why this strain switches at such a high rate and why it would want to. 

A first look showed that when this yeast strain went from fluffy to smooth, it gained an extra copy of chromosome XVI.  When the new smoother yeast lost this extra chromosome, it reverted back to its fluffy look.  A harder look showed that an extra chromosome XVI wasn’t the only way to a smoother yeast.  Occasionally the fluffy to smooth change could be caused by an extra copy of chromosome III, X, or XV, and an extra copy of V caused a slightly smoother colony.

These results suggest a couple of different ways that an extra chromosome might be leading to a smooth colony.  One is that just having extra DNA around causes the change.  The other is that a variety of genes can cause the change when present in higher than normal doses.  The researchers show pretty convincingly that the second reason is probably the right mechanism.

First off they show that not all extra chromosomes are created equal.  Some lead to a very sickly yeast while others have no effect on fluffiness.  Just having extra DNA around is probably not the culprit.

The authors next set out to figure out exactly what was going on with chromosome XVI.  Through a series of deletion studies, they found a single gene responsible for the fluffy to smooth shift – DIG1.  Overexpression of this single gene caused fluffy colonies to turn smooth.  Presumably there are other genes on some of the other chromosomes that serve a similar function.

They next set out to determine why yeast would ever want to do this.  Turns out that, as you might expect, each phenotype has an advantage in a different situation.  On a solid surface the fluffy strain did better, while the smooth one did better in liquid media.  

The “extra chromosome option” is actually a great way for a sedentary beast like yeast to quickly deal with a new situation.  Gaining an extra chromosome is much simpler than gaining a new mutation that up-regulates a gene under certain situations.

Figuring out this mechanism of fluffy to smooth transitions isn’t just fun biology either.  It may also point us in new directions for treatments for a variety of diseases, including drug-resistant cancers and microbial infections. 

In many cases, these cells become resistant because their chromosome number has changed from what is considered the norm.  If we could find a way to force cells to maintain the correct number of chromosomes, we might be able to make them more susceptible to drugs.  As usual, yeast studies are much more than fluff…they smooth the way to the future.

by D. Barry Starr, Ph.D., Director of Outreach Activities, Stanford Genetics

Categories: Research Spotlight

Tags: aneuploidy, Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Anchors Aweigh for Peroxisomes

August 15, 2013

Suppose you had a fleet of rowboats that you wanted to split up evenly between two shores.  You probably wouldn’t just set them free and hope they drifted to the right places. A better way might be to run some ropes from the distant shore and pull half the rowboats across.  That way you’d be sure to get the distribution of boats that you wanted.

Dividing cells face a similar problem with their organelles.  When cells divide, they need to make sure mother and daughter receive the right number of organelles.  Otherwise one or both could die!

This is obviously too important to just leave to chance, which is why cells have devised ways to precisely control how many organelles end up in mother and daughter.  But not every organelle is divided in the same way.  In our boat analogy, some are pulled over with ropes, others with chains, some with winches and so on. 

We don’t know a lot about how some organelles are distributed between mother and daughter cells.  For example, the details have not been worked out for peroxisomes, the organelles that contain enzymes for beta-oxidation of fatty acids. Until now, that is…

In a recent study in The EMBO Journal, Knoblach and colleagues looked in great detail at how yeast cells distribute their peroxisomes. During budding, some peroxisomes stay tied up in the mother cell while others are transported into the bud and re-tied there.  

The authors found that the structure that ties up peroxisomes is like a rope with hooks at both ends. One hook attaches to the peroxisome, while the other hook attaches to the cortical endoplasmic reticulum (ER) near the cell wall. Surprisingly, the same protein, Pex3p, acts as the hook at both ends of the rope, connecting it to both ER and peroxisomes.

The authors already knew that some peroxisomes stayed anchored around the edges of the mother cell while others were “mobile” and moved to the daughter when yeast cells divided. They also knew that the protein Inp1p was important for anchoring peroxisomes. In the inp1 null mutant all the peroxisomes are mobile and end up in the bud, while overexpressing Inp1p causes all the peroxisomes to be anchored in the mother cell and stay there.

Knoblach and colleagues suspected that Inp1p might act as the rope that tethers peroxisomes. To test this, they fused Inp1p to a protein that sits in the mitochondrial outer membrane, Tom70p. Now peroxisomes in this strain were attached to mitochondria! This established that Inp1p is the tether.

Another major molecular player in this process is Pex3p. The pex3 null mutant phenotype looks a lot like the inp1 mutant phenotype: the mother cell loses all its peroxisomes and they end up in the bud. Pex3p is an integral membrane protein that is channeled through the ER on its way to the peroxisomal membrane – so it can be present in both places. The authors found that both the N terminus and C terminus of Inp1p bind to Pex3p. All this suggested that together, Inp1p and Pex3p might form a structure that links peroxisomes to the ER.

They were able to show that Inp1p and Pex3p interact directly both at the peroxisome and at the ER using a neat trick called bimolecular fluorescence complementation. This simply means that if the two halves of green fluorescent protein (GFP) are brought close to each other, they can fluoresce like the intact protein.  The basic idea is that they fused the first half of GFP with Inp1p and the second half with Pex3p and looked for green spots to turn up in the right place of the cell.  Of course this is easier said than done!

To pull this off, the authors had to first make two haploid strains of opposite mating types. The first had a pex3 mutation that caused all Pex3p to be stuck in the ER, anchoring all its peroxisomes there. It also carried a version of INP1 that was fused to half of GFP.

The second strain had a different pex3 mutation that set all peroxisomes adrift, and this mutant pex3 gene was fused to the other half of GFP. This strain also had an additional marker that made peroxisomes glow red.

When the cytoplasms of these two strains had a chance to mix after mating, the zygote had red peroxisomes with glowing green spots, showing that Inp1p-half GFP from the first strain was interacting with Pex3p-half GFP from the second strain.  Because the Inp1p-half GFP of the first strain was bound to ER-localized Pex3p, and the Pex3p-half GFP of the second strain was localized to peroxisomes, this result showed that Inp1p connects peroxisomes with the ER.

The authors studied the kinetics of this process in a lot more detail and even tracked the wanderings of individual peroxisomes. The model that comes from all this work is that at start of budding, some peroxisomes are bound to Inp1p and others aren’t. Those that aren’t bound to Inp1p move to the bud, and the others stay anchored to the mother cell’s ER. Meanwhile, during budding Pex3p passes through the ER and re-emerges at the ER membrane at the bud cortex. It can then bind Inp1p, which in turn binds to the Pex3p on the surface of the migrating peroxisomes to dock them in the bud.

Not only is this cool just from a basic biology perspective, but it may also help us deal with some human peroxisome biogenesis disorders.  For example, Zellweger syndrome and infantile Refsum disease are associated with specific mutations in the human ortholog of PEX3. Once again, little S. cerevisiae is helping us navigate the inner workings of eukaryotic cells.  

by Maria Costanzo, Ph.D., Senior Biocurator, SGD

Categories: Research Spotlight, Yeast and Human Disease

Tags: peroxisomes, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, yeast model for human disease

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