New & Noteworthy

Sopping up Uranium with Yeast

March 23, 2012

Yeast may be good for more than making bread and beer or understanding how eukaryotes like humans work.  They may also be useful for cleaning up high volume, low concentration waste uranium (think uranium waste water).

The idea would be to add yeast to the contaminated area, have the yeast take the uranium up, put the yeast into radioactive waste and repeat with new yeast.  This would be a relatively cheap, simple way to detoxify this form of radioactive waste.

An obvious way to improve on this idea is to identify yeast strains that can accumulate more uranium than the wild type strain.  In a new study out in Geomicrobiology Journal, Sakamoto and coworkers have started down this path by identifying genes that allow yeast to grow in the presence of uranium and those involved in uranium accumulation.

They did this with two different screens using a set of 4,098 non-essential gene deletion strains.  In the first they identified 13 strains that grew more poorly than wild type at 0.5 mM uranium.  And in the second, they identified 17 strains that accumulated less uranium than wild type.

There was very little overlap between the two sets of strains suggesting different pathways (or sets of pathways) may be involved in accumulation and growth.  However, there were two deletion strains that showed up in both screens.  Both of the identified genes, PHO86 and PHO2, are involved in phosphate metabolism.

These genes definitely make sense.  A number of previous studies had hinted strongly that uranium accumulates on the surface of yeast in the form of insoluble uranium-phosphate complexes. 

The idea behind the importance of these genes is that yeast deals with higher uranium levels by scavenging more phosphate.  When genes involved in this process are knocked out, the yeast can’t get the extra phosphate it needs to form the insoluble uranium phosphate complexes.  Now it grows poorly and has less uranium on its surface. 

It will be interesting to see how the other genes are involved in uranium survival or accumulation.  Perhaps one day researchers will be able to turn yeast into a grade A uranium sponge.  Here’s hoping they can!

For those really interested, here is a list of the genes identified in each screen:

Uranium sensitive: PHO2, PHO84, PHO86, PHO87, VPS74, ENT5, CPR1, GLO2, OPI1, ATG15, PTC6, SLC1, and uncharacterized ORF, YPR116W.

Uranium accumulation: OPI1, PHO86, APL4, PEX10, VPS74, PHO2, SPT20, GAL11, SWP82, IVY1, FLO1, DIT2, RPL2A, and uncharacterized ORFs, YGL214W, YJR098C, YNL035C, and YPR116W.       

A nice lecture on bioremediation (using biology to clean up toxic waste)

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

Categories: Research Spotlight

Tags: bioremediation, nuclear waste, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, uranium, yeast

Engineering Magnetic Yeast

March 02, 2012

With a bit of genetic manipulation and a hearty diet of iron, Nishida and Silver report in the latest issue of PLOS Biology that they have caused yeast cells to become magnetic. And this isn’t just a parlor trick. Their research could one day help other scientists create new therapies for the sick and new applications for research and industry.

The first step in the process was to load the yeast up with magnetic iron. The authors took a couple of different approaches.

The simplest was to grow the yeast in lots of iron. Surprisingly, without any other manipulation, this was enough to make the yeast a bit magnetic. But the authors wanted more magnetism.

To accomplish this goal, they needed to keep yeast from transporting excess iron to their vacuole where it is nonmagnetic. They did this by knocking out the gene encoding the vacuolar iron transporter, CCC1.

When grown in lots of ferric citrate, the ccc1Δ strain was about 1.8 times more magnetic than wild type. Nice, but to get even more magnetic yeast, Nishida and Silver added back the three human genes necessary to reconstitute human ferritin. This new strain was now about 2.8 times more magnetic than wild type.

None of this was really earth-shattering yet. Scientists knew that iron was needed to make a cell magnetic and that ferritin-iron complexes were a bit magnetic. What made these initial studies important was that they gave Nishida and Silver the tools to study the underlying mechanisms of magnetism.

The authors took a directed approach to study this problem and knocked out genes known to be involved in iron homeostasis or oxidative stress. Of the 60 knockout strains tested, tco89Δ was the only one to consistently be less magnetic than the wild type strain. On average it was about two fold less magnetic.

Tco89p is a nonessential part of TORC1, a complex involved in the regulation of cell growth in response to nutrients, stress, and redox states. As might be predicted from TORC1 function, the authors determined that nutrients and the redox state of the medium affected the yeast’s magnetism. They then expanded their screen to look for genes involved in carbon metabolism and mitochondrial redox that might affect magnetism and discovered several (POS5, YFH1, SNF1, and ZWF1).

The current model is that the redox state within the cell and in particular, within the mitochondria, impacts the amount of iron precipitation and hence magnetism in yeast. This is consistent with the iron deposits the authors saw in electron micrographs of the mitochondrial membrane of the magnetic yeast.

These findings should help point researchers in productive directions for engineering magnetic cells in other systems but it is only a first step. Science has a long way to go before therapies based on cell magnetism are helping patients.

More details on these magnetic yeast

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

Categories: Research Spotlight

Tags: ferritin, magnetic, MRI, yeast

Finally Great Tasting, Low Alcohol Beer

February 17, 2012

Let’s face it: low alcohol beer just doesn’t taste that great.  This is because the alcohol is either diluted or removed chemically after fermentation.  Both methods wreak havoc with a beer’s flavor.

Dr. John Morrissey of University College Cork is trying to change this.  His lab is working to generate a strain of yeast that turns some but not all of its sugar into alcohol.  That way the beer process is the same, just with less alcohol at the end.

This is different from stopping fermentation early.  In that case there are still sugars in the final product which ruin a beer’s taste even more than removing the alcohol!  Here the same amount of sugars are used up, it is just that only part of that energy has gone into making the alcohol.  Same sugar content, less alcohol.

Although we don’t have all the details because of intellectual property issues, what we do know is that he compared the genomes of yeast species that make a lot of alcohol and those that don’t.  In an email he stated that he focused on genes that would affect carbon metabolism without perturbing redox balance in a significant way.  Presumably he then swapped the appropriate genes between strains and created his low alcohol strain.

This is not only a godsend for low alcohol beer, but it may be useful for other fermentation processes as well.  For example, maybe something similar can be done for low or no alcohol wines which, apparently, are even less tasty than low alcohol beer.  Designated drivers everywhere will be thanking Dr. Morrissey profusely if he can make decent tasting, low alcohol drinks a reality.

And apparently it isn’t just designated drivers that want this stuff.  Judging by recent upticks in sales of the relatively low quality low alcohol beers currently on the market, there is definitely a market out there for such beverages.  A cool science project, decent low alcohol beer and nice profits to boot!  Who could ask for more? 

How beer is made, from Modern Marvels, http://www.history.com

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

Categories: Research Spotlight

Tags: carbon metabolism, fermentation, low alcohol beer, redox, yeast

Multicellularity a Snap? Maybe so…

February 10, 2012

Some people might think that the transition from single-celled creatures to multi-cellular ones must have been tough.  After all, single celled organisms ruled the world for the first one or two billion years of life here on Earth. 

And yet, all multi-celled beasts didn’t evolve from the same ancestor.  Current theories are that multicellularity evolved dozens of times over the ages.  In fact, all of the transitional stages of multicellular life can be seen in the volvocine green algae species around today.  So maybe it isn’t so tricky after all.

Using a very clever screen in yeast, Ratcliff and coworkers have shown that they can get crude multicellular life to evolve in the lab.  Basically they only let the yeast that settled easily to the bottom of a shaking flask go on to reproduce.  Within 60 or so days, they had the beautiful, snowflake-like, multicellular beasts made up of multiple yeast cells shown in the image to the right.

Of course multicellular is more than having a bunch of cells stuck together.  Heck, yeast do that now in something called flocs.  No, to be multicellular, these yeast need to reproduce in a way that generates new multicellular yeast and to have specialized cells.  The snowflake yeast from this experiment did both.

These yeast did not reproduce by creating sperm and eggs that combine to generate progeny.  Instead they reproduced more like a lot of plants do.  They produced smaller versions of themselves which then went on to grow to “adulthood.”  Multicellular life gave birth to more multicellular life.

Cells within these snowflakes were also willing to die for the common good.  For example, the cell where the juvenile snowflake was attached would undergo apoptosis so the juvenile could be released.  No single-celled organism would willingly take that kind of hit for other cells.

So it looks like these researchers managed to evolve multicellular organisms from single-celled ones in just a few months.  Pretty amazing what can be learned from yeast!

Of course some care is needed here.  Yeast actually evolved from a multicellular ancestor so some sort of memory of multicellular life may still be lurking in its genes.  If true, this might make the transition from one to many simpler in yeast than in other single-celled organisms. 

This is why the researchers plan to try similar experiments with single celled organisms that have been single cells throughout their evolutionary life.  Then they’ll have an even better idea about how easy the “one to many cells” transition is.

Multicellular yeast having babies.

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

Categories: Research Spotlight

Tags: evolution, multicellular, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, yeast

Replicate Late, Mutate More

January 30, 2012

 

Variation in the DNA that results in natural selection does not come about randomly. Where a piece of DNA is in the genome and how it is used affects its chances for being mutated. The end result is that the genomes we see today are the product of these nonrandom mutation rates.

One of the first places this became apparent was in transcribed genes. Scientists found that the transcribed strand of active genes has fewer mutations than the nontranscribed strand. They found the major reason for this was transcription-coupled repair.

Now in a new study in yeast, Agier and Fischer have shown that when a piece of DNA is replicated affects its chance of being mutated too. They compared the genomes of 39 different strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and found that late replicating DNA is 1.3 times more likely to be mutated compared to early replicating DNA. This is consistent with a recent study by Chen and coworkers that showed a similar result in the human genome.

This means that if a piece of DNA happens to be further away from an origin of replication, it will build up more mutations over time. And while a 1.3 fold increase in mutation rate might seem small, it is predicted to have a significant impact on genomic variation and natural selection on an evolutionary time scale.

There are a number of potential models for why late replicating DNA is more likely to be mutated. One hypothesis is that cells use different repair mechanisms at different times during S phase: cells in early S-phase repair replication errors with relatively error-free repair mechanisms like template switching with newly formed sister chromatids, while cells in late S-phase tend to rely on more error-prone translesion repair pathways.

Other possible models rely on potential differences between the cellular environment in early and late S-phase. They include altered metabolism, increased presence of single stranded DNA, or even a slow decrease in DNA repair as S-phase progresses. The researchers do not know which, if any, of these mechanisms is responsible for the change in mutation rate.

It may even be that different mechanisms are responsible in yeast and humans. Agier and Fischer found that in yeast, the leading strand had higher rates of substitution towards C and A than did the lagging strand. Chen et. al. found the opposite to be true in human cells. Either they use different mechanisms or similar mechanisms can end up with opposite results.

These findings suggest that the genomes observed today are at least partly the result of the nonrandom nature of neutral mutations. Highly expressed genes near an origin of replication are much less likely to be mutated than are genes with low expression more distant from an origin of replication.

And there are other known and yet to be discovered ways that certain DNA ends up more mutated than other DNAs. Just like in real estate, the key to mutation rate is location, location, location.

Categories: Research Spotlight

Tags: DNA replication, mutation, S phase, translesion, yeast

Yeast with Dementia

January 04, 2012

Even though it doesn’t have a brain, yeast is teaching us a lot about Alzheimer’s.  Researchers are using this simple eukaryote to figure out what previously identified Alzheimer’s-related genes may be doing in humans as well as to identify new genes that might be involved in this terrible disease.  Studies like this may even one day help scientists find better treatments.

Alzheimer’s is a form of dementia that hits about 50% of people over 85.  The video below has a great summary of the how the disease progresses:

As the video states, plaques and tangles are linked to the memory loss that is associated with Alzheimer’s.  Scientists know that the plaques are  amyloids of misfolded AΒ peptides and that AΒ peptides that come from the amyloid precursor protein (APP).  What they don’t know is how AΒ peptides cause their damage and if it can be stopped.  And so far, genome wide association studies (GWAS) in humans have not shed much light on this problem either.

That isn’t to say that GWAS have been a waste of time.  They haven’t.  These studies have identified a number of alleles of a few genes that impact a person’s risk for ending up with Alzheimer’s.  They just haven’t been able to link the build up of plaques with the identified genes.  This is where yeast comes in.

Treusch and coworkers created a strain of yeast in which the AΒ peptide was sent to the endoplasmic reticulum.  This mimics what happens to the peptide in the cells of Alzheimer’s patients.  These yeast grew more slowly and developed protein complexes reminiscent of plaques.

They then added each of 5532 yeast open reading frames to this strain to identify genes that specifically affected its growth rate.  Of the 40 different yeast genes they found, two (YAP1802 and INP52) were yeast homologs of human genes (PICALM and SYNJ1) that had already been identified to be important in Alzheimer’s risks.  These results validated the screen and gave the researchers the confidence to dive deeper into their results.

The researchers decided to focus on the 12 genes that had very close human homologs.  Of these 12 genes, 10 dealt with endocytosis and the cytoskeleton and at least three had been implicated in previous genome wide association studies in humans.  Further work by these authors validated four of these genes by showing that they had similar effects on AΒ cell toxicity in the worm model C. elegans.

In one of the most interesting parts of the study, the researchers used the yeast strain to show why the GWAS-identified gene PICALM affects Alzheimer’s patients.  Rather than modifying APP trafficking as had been previously proposed, their results support a model where PICALM lessens the impact of misfolded AΒ plaques on the cell. 

This study is another example of the awesome power of yeast genetics.  Who would have thought that a brainless yeast could teach us so much about Alzheimer’s?

Simple explanation of the genetics of Alzheimer’s

More information about Alzheimer’s

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

Categories: Research Spotlight, Yeast and Human Disease

Tags: alzheimer's, amyloid, APP, model organism, PICALM, plaque, yeast

Next