New & Noteworthy

Yeast are People Too

June 03, 2015

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Cars on the road today all look pretty similar from the outside, whether they’re gasoline-fueled or electric. On the inside, they’re fairly similar too. Even between the two kinds of car, you can probably get away with swapping parts like the air conditioner, the tires, or the seat belts. Although cars have changed over the years, these things haven’t changed all that much.

The engine, though, is a different story. All the working parts of that Nissan Leaf engine have “evolved” together into a very different engine from the one in that Ford Mustang. They both have engines, but the parts aren’t really interchangeable any more.

We can think of yeast and human cells like this too. We’ve known for a while that we humans have quite a bit in common with our favorite little workhorse S. cerevisiae. But until now, no one had any idea how common it was for yeast-human pairs of similar-looking proteins to function so similarly that they are interchangeable between organisms.

In a study published last week in Science, Kachroo and colleagues looked at this question by systematically replacing a large set of essential yeast genes with their human orthologs. Amazingly, they found that almost half of the human proteins could keep the yeast mutants alive.

Also surprising was that the degree of similarity between the yeast and human proteins wasn’t always the most important factor in whether the proteins could be interchanged. Instead, membership in a gene module—a set of genes encoding proteins that act in a group, such as a complex or pathway—was an important predictor. 

The authors found that genes within a given module tended to be either mostly interchangeable or mostly not interchangeable, suggesting that if one protein changes during evolution, then the proteins with which it interacts may need to evolve as well. So we can trade air conditioner parts between the Leaf and the Mustang, but the Mustang’s spark plugs won’t do a thing in that newly evolved electric engine!

To begin their systematic survey, Kachroo and colleagues chose a set of 414 yeast genes that are essential for life and have a single human ortholog. They cloned the human cDNAs in plasmids for yeast expression, and transformed them into yeast that were mutant in the orthologous gene to see if the human gene would supply the missing yeast function.

They tested complementation using three different assays. In one, the human ortholog was transformed into a strain where expression of the yeast gene was under control of a tetracycline-repressible promoter. So if the human gene complemented the yeast mutation, it would be able to keep the yeast alive in the presence of tetracycline.

Another assay used temperature-sensitive mutants in the yeast genes and looked to see if the human orthologs could support yeast growth at the restrictive temperature. And the third assay tested whether a yeast haploid null mutant strain carrying the human gene could be recovered after sporulation of the heterozygous null diploid.

Remarkably, 176 human genes could keep the corresponding yeast mutant alive in at least one of these assays. A survey of the literature for additional examples brought the total to 199, or 47% of the tested set. After a billion years of separate evolution, yeast and humans still have hundreds of interchangeable parts!

That was the first big surprise. But the researchers didn’t stop there. They wondered what distinguished the genes that were interchangeable from those that weren’t. The simplest explanation would seem to be that the more similar the two proteins, the more likely they would work the same way. 

But biology is never so simple, is it? While it was true that human proteins with greater than 50% amino acid identity to yeast proteins were more likely to be able to replace their yeast equivalents, and that those with less than 20% amino acid identity were least likely to function in yeast, those in between did not follow the same rules. There was no correlation between similarity and interchangeability in ortholog pairs with 20-50% identity.  

After comparing 104 different types of quantitative data on each ortholog pair, including codon usage, gene expression levels, and so on, the authors found only one good predictor. If one yeast protein in a protein complex or pathway could be exchanged with its human ortholog, then usually most of the rest of the proteins in that complex or pathway could too.

All of the genes that that make the proteins in these systems are said to be part of a gene module. Kachroo and colleagues found that most or all of the genes in a particular module were likely to be in the same class, either interchangeable or not. We can trade pretty much all of the parts between the radios of a Leaf and a Mustang, but none of the engine parts.

For example, none of the tested subunits of three different, conserved protein complexes (the TriC chaperone complex, origin recognition complex, and MCM complex) could complement the equivalent yeast mutations. But in contrast, 17 out of 19 tested genes in the sterol biosynthesis pathway were interchangeable.

Even within a single large complex, the proteasome, the subunits of one sub-complex, the alpha ring, were largely interchangeable while those of another sub-complex, the beta ring, were not. The researchers tested whether this trend was conserved across other species by testing complementation by proteasome subunit genes from Saccharomyces kluyveri, the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, and the African clawed frog Xenopus laevis. Sure enough, alpha ring subunits from these organisms complemented the S. cerevisiae mutations, while beta ring subunits did not.

These results suggest that selection pressures operate similarly on all the genes in a module. And if proteins continue to interact across evolution, they can diverge widely in some regions while their interaction interfaces stay more conserved, so that orthologs from different species are more likely to be interchangeable.

The finding that interchangeability is so common has huge implications for research on human proteins. It’s now conceivable to “humanize” an entire pathway or complex, replacing the yeast genes with their human equivalents. And that means that all of the versatile tools of yeast genetics and molecular biology can be brought to bear on the human genes and proteins.

At SGD we’ve always known that yeast has a lot to say about human health and disease. With the growing body of work in these areas, we’re expanding our coverage of yeast-human orthology, cross-species functional complementation, and studies of human disease-associated genes in yeast. Watch this space as we announce new data in YeastMine, in download files, and on SGD web pages.

by Maria Costanzo, Ph.D., Senior Biocuration Scientist, SGD

Categories: Research Spotlight, Yeast and Human Disease

Tags: evolution, functional complementation, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, yeast model for human disease

Abstract Deadline Extended for ICYGMB

May 28, 2015

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Breaking news: the deadline for submission of abstracts for oral presentations at the 27th International Conference on Yeast Genetics and Molecular Biology (ICYGMB) has been extended. Abstracts may be submitted for talks in the plenary sessions or in parallel workshops until June 7th.

Abstracts for poster presentations may be submitted until July 15th. But be sure to register for the conference by June 30th to get the early registration price!

Submit your abstract

Register for the conference

Conference home page

Categories: Conferences

The Failed Hook Up: A Sitcom Starring S. cerevisiae

May 27, 2015

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As anyone who watches a situation comedy knows, long range relationships are tricky. The longer the couple is separated, the more they drift apart. Eventually they are just too different, and they break up.

Of course if this were the end of the story, it would be the plot of the worst comedy ever. What usually happens in the sitcom is that one or both of them find someone more compatible and live happily ever after (with lots of silliness and high jinks).

Turns out that according to a new study by Hou and coworkers, our friend Saccharomyces cerevisiae could star in this sitcom. When different populations live in different environments, they drift apart. Eventually, because they accumulate chromosomal translocations and other serious mutations, they have trouble mating and having healthy offspring.

Now researchers already knew that big changes in yeast, like chromosomal translocations, affect hybrid offspring. But what was controversial before and what this study shows is that, as is known for plants and animals, smaller changes like point mutations can affect the ability of distinct populations of yeast to have healthy progeny. It is like Jerry Seinfeld being incompatible with a girl because she eats her peas one at a time (click here for other silly reasons Jerry breaks up with girlfriends).  

The key to finding that yeast can be Seinfeldesque was to grow hybrid offspring in different environments. Hybrids that did great on rich media like YPD sometimes suffered under certain, specific growth conditions. Relying on the standard medium YPD masked mutations that could have heralded the beginnings of a new species of yeast.

See, genetic isolation is a powerful way for speciation to happen. One population generates a mutation in a gene and the second population has a mutation in a second gene. In combination, these two mutations cause a growth defect or even death. Now each population must evolve on its own, eventually separating into two species.

To show that this is a route that yeast can take to new species, Hou and coworkers mated 27 different Saccharomyces cerevisiae isolates with the reference laboratory strain S288C and grew their progeny under 20 different conditions. These strains were chosen because they were all able to produce spores with S288C that were viable on rich medium (YPD).

Once they eliminated the 59 pairings that involved parental strains that could not grow under certain conditions, they found that 117 out of 481 or 24.3% of crosses showed at least some negative effect on the growth of the progeny under at least some environmental conditions. And some of these were pretty bad. In 32 cases, at least 20% of the spores could not survive.

The authors decided to focus on crosses between S288C and a clinical isolate, YJM241, where around 25% of spores were inviable under growth conditions that required good respiration, such as the nonfermentable carbon source glycerol. They found that rather than each strain having a variant that affected respiration, the growth defect happened because of two complementary mutations in the clinical isolate.

The first mutation was a nonsense mutation in COX15, a protein involved in maturation of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase complex, which is essential for respiration. The second was a nonsense suppressor mutation in a tyrosine tRNA, SUP7. So YJM241 was fine because it had both the mutation and the mechanism for suppressing the mutation. Its offspring with S288C were not so lucky.

Around 1 in 4 progeny got the mutated COX15 gene without SUP7 and so could not survive under conditions that required respiration. Which of course is why this was missed when the two strains were mated on YPD, where respiration isn’t required for growth.

So this is a case where the separated population, the clinical isolate YJM241, changed on its own such that it would have difficulty producing viable progeny with any other yeast strains. Like the narrator in that old Simon and Garfunkel song, it had become an island unto itself.

The researchers wondered whether this kind of change—a nonsense mutation combined with a suppressor—occurs frequently in natural yeast populations. They surveyed 100 different S. cerevisiae genome sequences and found that nonsense mutations are actually pretty common. Nonsense suppressor mutations were another story, though: they found exactly zero.

Apparently nonsense suppressor mutations are really rare in the yeast world, and Hou and colleagues wondered whether this was because they had a negative effect on growth. They added the SUP7 suppressor mutant gene to 23 natural isolates. It had negative effects on most of the isolates during growth on rich media, but it was more of a mixed bag under various stress conditions. Sometimes the mutation had negative effects and sometimes it had positive effects.

The fact that a suppressor mutation can provide a growth advantage under the right circumstances, combined with the fact that they are very rare, suggests that a new suppressor arising might help a yeast population out of a jam, but once the environment improves the yeast are free to jettison it. Suppressor mutations may be a transitory phenomenon, a momentary dalliance.

So, separate populations of yeast can change over time in subtle ways that prevent them from mating with one another. This can eventually lead to the formation of new species as the changes cause the two to drift too far apart genetically. It is satisfying to know that yeast drift apart like any other plant, animal, or sitcom character.

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

Categories: Research Spotlight

Tags: evolution, Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Getting the Big Picture from 100 Genomes

May 20, 2015

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Imagine if aliens visited the earth to learn about dogs, but they stumbled upon a colony of the very rare Peruvian Hairless. Taking a sample for DNA analysis, they would retreat to their home planet, do their studies, and conclude that all dogs had smooth, mottled skin and a stiff mohawk—as well as whatever crazy mutations the Peruvian Hairless happens to carry. 

Until recently, S. cerevisiae researchers have been a bit like those aliens. The genomic sequence of the reference strain S288C was completed in 1996, and for a long time it was the only sequence available. Scientists knew a lot about the S288C genome, but they didn’t have any perspective on the species as a whole.

In the past few years, genomic sequences have become available from a handful of other strains. But now, as described in a new paper in Genome Research, Strope and colleagues have determined the genomic sequences of 93 additional S. cerevisiae strains to make the number an even hundred.

This collection of strains and sequences has already provided new insights into yeast phenotypic and genotypic variation, and represents an incredible resource for future studies. And the comparison with this collection of other strains suggests that in some ways, S288C may be just as unusual as the Peruvian Hairless.

This collection of strains and their sequences gave the researchers a much broader perspective across the whole S. cerevisiae species. It’s as if the aliens discovered Golden Retrievers, Great Danes, Chihuahuas, and more. We only have space here to touch upon a few of the highlights.

First off, they confirmed what many yeast researchers have suspected for a while—S288C is a bit odd.  We already knew that a S288C carries polymorphisms in several genes that affect its phenotype. For example, the MIP1 gene in S288C encodes a mitochondrial DNA polymerase that is less efficient than in other strains, making its mitochondrial genome less stable.

Back when fewer strain sequences were available, it wasn’t clear whether the S288C polymorphisms in other genes like MKT1, SSD1, MIP1, AMN1, FLO8, HAP1, BUL2, and SAL1 were the exception or the rule. Now that Strope and colleagues had 100 genomes in hand, they could see that these differences are indeed peculiar to S288C and its close relative W303.  They might have arisen because of the long genetic isolation of the strains, or because of special selective pressures they faced during growth in the lab.

They also found a lot of variation in how often S. cerevisiae strains have acquired whole chromosomal regions from other Saccharomyces species. This process, known as introgression, happens when related species mate to form hybrids. Stretches of DNA that are transferred in this way are recognizable because gene order is preserved, but all the genes they contain are highly diverged.

The researchers found 141 of these regions containing 401 genes. Many showed similarity to S. paradoxus, which is known to hybridize with S. cerevisiae, but others apparently came from unknown, as yet un-sequenced Saccharomyces species. In a couple of cases that the authors looked at closely, the introgressed genes had slightly different functions from their native S. cerevisiae counterparts.

Another notable finding by Strope and colleagues concerned some genes that exist in multiple copies. The ENA genes, encoding an ATP-dependent sodium pump, are present in 3 copies in S288C (ENA1, ENA2, and ENA5), while the CUP1-1 and CUP1-2 genes, encoding metallothionein that binds to copper and mediates copper resistance, are present in 10-15 copies.

The sequence coverage in these regions relative to their flanking regions allowed the researchers to see exactly how many repeats are present in each strain. All had between 1-14 copies of ENA genes and 1-18 copies of CUP genes. Interestingly, the strains of clinical origin had significantly higher copy numbers of CUP genes than the non-clinical strains, suggesting that copper resistance is an important trait for virulence.

So, instead of being confined to the S288C genome, S. cerevisiae researchers can now get a much fuller idea of the range of genetic and phenotypic variation within the species. The strains (available at the Fungal Genetic Stock Center), along with their genome sequences (available in GenBank), are an amazing resource for classical and quantitative genetics and comparative genomics.

Unlike those aliens, we won’t end up thinking of yeast as a mostly bald dog with a mohawk. No, we will have a fuller picture of S. cerevisiae strains in all their glory.

A few technical details

In selecting the strains to sequence, Strope and colleagues chose from a wide variety of yeast cultures isolated from the environment and from hospital patients with opportunistic S. cerevisiae infections. But they faced a problem: many of the cultures had irregular numbers of chromosomes or genome rearrangements, which would complicate both interpretation of the sequence data and any future genetic analysis.

To avoid this problem, the researchers selected only strains that were able to sporulate and produce four viable spores—showing that their genomes weren’t messed up. They also wanted strains with no auxotrophies (nutritional requirements), since these can negatively affect growth and complicate the comparison of phenotypes. In some cases, they corrected specific mutations in the strains to increase their fitness.

They ended up with 93 homozygous diploid strains to sequence. Producing paired-end reads of 101 bp, they generated genome assemblies that had 22- to 650-fold coverage per strain.

Because the sequence reads were relatively short, they didn’t provide enough information to assemble the sequence across repetitive regions. So Strope and colleagues used a genetic method to determine gene order. They crossed haploid derivatives of the strains to the reference strain S288C; if their genomes were not colinear with that of S288C, then some of the resulting spores would be inviable.

This analysis showed that 79 of the strains had chromosomes colinear to those of S288C, and allowed assembly of their genomes across multicopy sequences. The remaining strains had chromosomal translocations relative to S288C. Twelve of these carried the same reciprocal translocation between chromosomes 8 and 16.

by Maria Costanzo, Ph.D., Senior Biocuration Scientist, SGD

Categories: Research Spotlight

Tags: genome, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, strains

If it Swims Like a Duck…

May 06, 2015

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Back in the 1980’s some U.S. politicians were proposing to raise money by something they called “revenue enhancements”. Richard Darman, the budget director at the time, correctly pointed out that a revenue enhancement really is just a tax increase by another name. 

To make his point, he used the expression, “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.” In other words, just because politicians call it something else, if a revenue enhancement does everything a tax increase does then it really is just a tax increase.

This same reasoning is often used in biology. If two regions of a protein look the same (are homologous) and the proteins do similar things, then the two similar regions do the same thing. Except, of course, when they don’t.

This probably isn’t what Conan O’Brien had in mind when he changed the famous expression a bit to say, “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a little person dressed as a duck,” but as is often the case with Team Coco, he was right in both biology and life. Not everything that looks and quacks like a duck is a duck, and not every homologous region in proteins that do similar things does the same thing.

Conan’s point is borne out in a new study out in GENETICS where Banerjee and coworkers show that even though the yeast Prp43 RNA helicase shares glycine patches with three of the proteins with which it interacts, this doesn’t mean the glycine patches are used the same way in each case. They may all look and act like ducks, but they are not all ducks! 

Glycine patches are short, glycine-rich protein motifs that are thought to help proteins recognize other proteins or RNAs. Two of the proteins that the researchers looked at, Spp382 and Sqs1, have glycine patches that are only subtly different from that of Prp43. In both of these, the glycine patch is important for interacting with Prp43, but that isn’t its only role. The patches really are ducks in this case, just different kinds of ducks—maybe a mallard and a mandarin duck.

In the case of the third protein, Pxr1, the glycine patch seems to have a completely different (albeit important) role. In this case, it really is a little person in a duck costume!

Prp43 is involved in two different kinds of RNA processing in the yeast cell—pre-mRNA splicing and rRNA maturation. It is one of the few proteins shared between the two complexes involved in each process.

Previous work had shown that different factors in each complex are important for bringing Prp43 to each party. For rRNA maturation, Sqs1 and Pxr1 are the critical players, while for pre-mRNA splicing, Spp382 is key. Since all four proteins share little else beyond a shared weakly conserved, 45-50 amino acid glycine-rich patch, one idea was that all of these proteins use the patch to interact with one another. As is true of much in life, the real answer is a bit more complicated than that.

The first set of experiments was to determine how well Prp43 interacts with each of the other glycine patches, using yeast two-hybrid assays. With full length proteins, the authors found that Spp382 interacted most strongly with Prp43, Pxr1 was the weakest, and Sqs1 was intermediate. They got a similar order of interaction when using just the glycine patches of each of these three proteins, with one small difference: the Pxr1 glycine patch did no better than the empty vector control.

This last result suggested that the glycine patch of Pxr1 was insufficient on its own to interact with Prp43. This was confirmed when they found no difference in the interaction of full length Pxr1 and Pxr1 deleted for the glycine patch.

The Pxr1 glycine patch apparently plays no role in interacting with Prp43—it really isn’t a duck at all. But that doesn’t mean it is dispensable! They showed later that it is critical for snoRNA processing, an important step needed for rRNA maturation.

Of course, sometimes if it looks and quacks like a duck, it is indeed a duck. This was the case for Sqs1 and Spp382.

As shown by two-hybrid and glycine patch swap assays, each of these glycine patches do seem to be important for interacting with Prp43. But each patch was more than just a way for two proteins to hook up.

To show this, Banerjee and coworkers looked for chimeras of Spp382, Pxr1, and Sqs1 that could rescue the lethal phenotype of a Spp382 deletion. First off, they showed that deleting the glycine patch from Spp382 was equivalent to deleting the whole protein—it was a lethal event. And as expected, replacing the Spp382 glycine patch with the one from Pxr1 was still lethal. But the Sqs1 glycine patch was able to rescue the deletion strain although it grew more slowly. So the Spp382 and Sqs1 glycine patches could to some extent substitute for one another.

One way to interpret the difference in growth rates is that it has to do with the fact that the glycine patch of Spp382 bound more strongly to Prp43 than did the one from Sqs1. The glycine patch from Sqs1 can’t fully rescue the Spp382 deletion strain because it is a weaker binder. But a set of mutagenesis experiments suggests that this is not the case.

The authors basically took the Spp382/Pxr1 chimera in which the Pxr1 glycine patch replaced the one from Spp382 and made a series of point mutations that slowly converted the glycine patch back to the one from Spp382. What they found was that the strength of interaction in the two-hybrid assay does not correlate with the level of rescue in the complementation assay. One interpretation is that the Spp382 glycine patch is doing more than recruiting Prp43.

Taken together, these results are a bit of a biological cautionary tale. Just because a protein region looks like another one, do not assume they are doing the same thing. Sometimes what looks and acts like a duck is just a man dressed as a duck.

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

Categories: Research Spotlight

Tags: glycine patch, protein-protein interactions, Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Second Announcement: 27th ICYGMB

May 04, 2015

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We at SGD are happy to share this announcement from the organizers of ICYGMB 2015. We’ll keep you up to date on the latest news about the conference and important deadlines. You can also follow announcements on Twitter by searching for the hashtag #yeast2015.

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Dear Colleague,

It is our great pleasure to invite you to the 27^th International Conference on Yeast Genetics and Molecular Biology (ICYGMB) to be held in Levico Terme, Trento, Italy, from 6^th to 12^th September 2015.

The goal of the conference is to bring together investigators from around the world to present and discuss research focused on yeasts as model for the understanding of molecular biology and genetic processes, and as a paramount biotechnological microorganism.

On our web site, you will have the opportunity to appreciate the scientific program and the beautiful scenery of this magnificent part of Italy where the Conference venue is located. The science, the surroundings, and, of course, the food will be in the best tradition of Italian professional hospitality.

Help us spread the news by word of mouth and circulate this second announcement.

Good science, food and location are waiting to make this a most memorable yeast Conference. 

Yours sincerely,

Duccio Cavalieri & Andriy Sibirniy (ICYGMB Organisers),

on behalf of the National and International Organizing Committees.

Categories: Conferences

A Factory Without Doors

April 29, 2015

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Imagine you have built a state-of-the-art factory to make a revolutionary product. The place is filled with gleaming assembly lines and you have hired the best talent in the world to run the place.

Unfortunately there was a glitch in the factory design—the builders forgot to put doors in! Now you can’t get the raw materials in to make that killer product that will change everything.

This may sound contrived or even silly, but it is sort of what is happening in attempts to use yeast to make biofuels from agricultural waste. Scientists have tweaked yeast cells to be able to turn xylose, a major sugar found in agricultural waste, into ethanol. But yeast has no transporter system for this sugar. A bit can get in through the windows, so to speak, but we need to put in a door so enough can get inside to make yeast a viable source for xylose-derived ethanol.

An important step was taken in this direction in a new study by Reznicek and coworkers. They used directed evolution to transform the Gal2 transporter of Saccharomyces cerevisiae into a better xylose transporter. And they succeeded.

After three successive rounds of mutagenesis, they transformed Gal2 from a transporter that prefers glucose into one that prefers xylose. When put in the right background, this mutant protein opens the door for getting yeast to turn agricultural waste into ethanol. Perhaps yeast can help us stave off cataclysmic climate change for just a bit longer. 

The first step was to find the right strain for assaying xylose utilization. They needed a strain lacking 8 hexose transporters, Hxt1-7 and Gal2, because these transporters can take up xylose (albeit at a very low efficiency). Deleting these genes “shuts the windows” and completely prevents the strain from utilizing xylose as a substrate (as well as impairing its ability to use glucose).

This strain was also engineered to be able to utilize xylose. It contained a xylose isomerase gene from an anaerobic fungus and also either overexpressed or lacked several S. cerevisiae genes involved in carbohydrate metabolism. With this strain in hand, the researchers were now ready to add a door to their closed off factory.  

The authors targeted amino acids 292 to 477 in Gal2. This region is thought to be critical for recognizing sugars, based on homology with other hexose transporters. They used mutagenic PCR conditions that generated an average of 4 point mutations in this region, and screened for mutants that grew better than others on plates containing 0.1% xylose.

In their initial screen they selected and replated the 80 colonies that grew best. They then chose the best 9 to analyze further. Of these 9, one mutant which they dubbed variant 1.1 grew better on xylose than a strain carrying wild-type GAL2. Variant 1.1 had a single amino acid change, L311R.

They repeated their assay using variant 1.1 as their starting source. Out of the 14,400 mutants assayed, they found four that did better than variant 1.1. These variants, dubbed 2.1-2.4, all shared the same M435T mutation.  Variant 2.1 had three additional mutations—L301R, K310R, and N314D.

These four new mutants showed better growth on 0.45% xylose, and after 62 hours, all the strains had pretty much used up the xylose in their media. Of the four, variant 2.1 appeared to be the best xylose utilizer: after 62 hours the authors could detect no xylose in the media at all. This variant also grew faster than the others in 0.1% xylose.

Reznicek and coworkers had definitely made Gal2 a better xylose transporter, but they weren’t done yet. They wanted to try to make a door that only let in the raw supplies (xylose) they wanted and not other sugars (glucose).

Up until now, the screens had been done with xylose as the sole carbon source. When they grew variant 2.1 in the presence of both 2% glucose and 2% xylose, they found that it preferentially used the glucose first. Their evolved transporter still preferred glucose over xylose!

Now in some ways this wasn’t surprising, as the mutations had not really affected the part of the protein thought to be involved in recognizing sugars. They next set out to evolve Gal2 so that it would transport xylose preferentially over glucose.

This time they used a slightly different background strain for their screen. This strain, which was deleted for hxk1, hxk2, glk1, and gal1, was unable to use glucose although it could transport it.

They repeated their mutagenesis and looked for mutants that grew best in 10% glucose and 2% xylose. We would predict that any growing mutants would have to transport xylose better than glucose. And this is just what they found.

When they analyzed the mutants, they found that the key mutation in making Gal2 prefer xylose over glucose in the variant 2.1 background was T386A. Based on homology with Hxt7, this mutation happens smack dab in the middle of the sugar recognition part of the protein. Most likely this mutation compromised the ability of Gal2 to recognize glucose, as opposed to improving recognition for xylose.

These experiments represent an important but by no means final step in engineering yeast to make fuel from biomass. We are on our way to a smaller carbon footprint and perhaps a world made somewhat safer from climate change.

First, beer, wine, and bread; next, keeping coral alive and saving countless species from extinction. Nice work, yeast.

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

Categories: Research Spotlight

Tags: biofuel, evolution, Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Sharing the Health

April 22, 2015

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A study published a few years ago made a big splash in the health news by showing that obesity is socially contagious. If one person gains weight, their friends tend to gain weight too—even if they don’t live in the same town! This works the opposite way too: thinner people are more likely to be socially connected with thinner people.

You might think this is because people tend to make friends with others of a similar size, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. The researchers concluded that there is actually a cause-and-effect relationship: we all influence the weight of our friends.

Well, S. cerevisiae cells are not so different. They may not have social lives, but since they can’t move on their own, they do tend to live together in colonies. And within these colonies, they influence each other: not in terms of weight, but in terms of the effect that calorie intake has on the length of their lives.

Turns out that like nematodes, fruit flies and even mice, living on a meager diet makes yeast live longer. And in a new study published in PLOS Biology, Mei and Brenner found that yeast cells actually share the life-extending benefits of calorie restriction with their neighbors, probably via a still-unidentified small molecule.  

Yeast are normally grown in the lab on medium containing 2% glucose. To a yeast cell, this is like an all-you-can eat buffet that goes on for its entire lifetime. Media with a glucose content of 0.5% or less represent a meager diet. But that deprivation comes with a benefit, in the form of an extended lifespan.

Mei and Brenner already had some hints from previous studies that yeast cells might excrete a substance that promoted lifespan extension. To study this systematically, they devised an experiment to test whether mother cells change the media surrounding them as they divide.

The researchers placed individual mother cells in specific spots on Petri plates containing an all-you-can-eat buffet (2% glucose), a restrictive diet (0.5% glucose), or a near-starvation diet (0.2% glucose). They watched as the cells budded, and removed each new daughter cell as it separated from the mother, counting the buds. The lifespan of a mother yeast cell, termed the replicative lifespan, is measured as the number of times she can bud during her lifetime.

After the mother cells had budded 15 times, half of them were physically moved to fresh parts of the same plate, while the other half were left in place. For the mothers on the 2% glucose plates where calories were abundant, the move didn’t change anything. The mothers that were moved had exactly the same replicative lifespan as those that stayed put.

On the plates where calories were restricted, it was a different story. The cells that stayed in place had extended lifespans, as expected under these low-calorie conditions. But the cells that were moved to new locations lost most or all of the life extension—even though calories were still restricted in their new locations. This suggested that the mother cells had secreted a “longevity factor” into the medium surrounding them, which then extended their lifespan when they got older.

There were a couple of metabolites that were prime candidates for the longevity factor: nicotinic acid (NA) and nicotinamide riboside (NR). NA and NR are precursors to nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD⁺), a compound that acts as an essential cofactor for many important enzymes. They had already been implicated in lifespan extension because mutating genes involved in their metabolism can affect how long various creatures live.

When the scientists tried supplementing calorie-restricted cells that had been moved to fresh medium with either NA or NR, they found that supplying these metabolites could restore the longevity benefit.  This finding strengthens the idea that NAD⁺ metabolism is involved.

But was the longevity factor actually NA or NR? To test this, Mei and Brenner grew yeast in liquid media with the different glucose concentrations and then tested for NA and NR in the medium using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry analysis.  They found that under all the conditions, the amount of NA secreted by the cells didn’t change and secreted NR was undetectable, suggesting that neither was the factor induced by calorie restriction.

To ask directly whether there is a diffusible longevity factor, the researchers grew cells in liquid medium containing 2% or 0.2% glucose until all the glucose was used up, then separated out the cells and freeze-dried the remaining liquid. They suspended the dried “conditioned” medium in water and spread it on plates to repeat the cell-moving assay.

Just like before, cells grown in 2% glucose had the same lifespan after being moved to a fresh spot, and the addition of resuspended conditioned medium to the plate didn’t change that. However, the starved cells grown on 0.2% glucose not only kept their lifespan extension when moved to conditioned media, but actually lived 10% longer compared to starved cells on un-conditioned media that were not moved.

When the researchers dialyzed the conditioned medium so that molecules smaller than 3.5 kDa were lost, the longevity factor was lost too. So it looks to be a small molecule, and of course they are actively pursuing its identity. Intriguingly, this would explain why other scientists have been unable to detect calorie restriction-induced lifespan extension in yeast using microfluidic technology, where immobilized yeast cells are grown with a constant exchange of growth medium. Under these conditions, a small molecule that promotes longevity would be washed away.

So, even though they don’t have Facebook friends, yeast cells influence the health of their peers. Rather than spreading the influence through social interactions as we humans do, they broadcast a chemical that is the key to long life. 

It’s tempting to think that the identity of this chemical will tell us something about human aging. But if this mysterious molecule worked in humans the same way as it does in yeast, people would still have to eat just enough food to stay alive to get the benefits. Still, perhaps the molecule can point us towards finding a treatment that will let us live longer while enjoying lots of good food. We could have our cake and eat it too!

by Maria Costanzo, Ph.D., Senior Biocuration Scientist, SGD

Categories: Research Spotlight

Tags: aging, calorie restriction, NAD+, Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Apply Now for the 2015 Yeast Genetics & Genomics Course

April 21, 2015

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This will be the 45th year that the legendary summer Yeast Genetics & Genomics course has been taught at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. (OK, the name didn’t include “Genomics” in the beginning…) The list of people who have taken the course reads like a Who’s Who of yeast research, including Nobel laureates and many of today’s leading scientists. 

The application deadline is May 15th, so don’t miss your chance! Find all the details and application form here.

This course (July 21 – August 10) provides a comprehensive education in all things yeast, from classical genetics through up-to-the-minute genomics. Things you’ll learn include:

• How to Find and Analyze Yeast Information Using SGD
• Transformation of Plasmids & Integrating DNAs
• Looking at Yeast Cells using Light Microscopy and Fluorescence Microscopy
• Manipulating Mating-Type and Epigenetic Transcriptional Silencing
• Meiosis & Tetrad Dissection
• Isolation and Characterization of Mutants
• Working with Essential Genes
• Synthetic Genetic Array Analysis
• Measuring Mutation Rates and Studying Human Genetic Variation in Yeast
• Detecting Copy Number Variants using Comparative Genomic Hybridization
• Mutation Detection using Whole Genome Sequencing and Linkage
• Barcode Sequencing and Comparative Functional Genomics

All these techniques will be summarized in a completely updated course manual, which will be published by CSHL Press.

Scientists who aren’t part of large, well-known yeast labs are especially encouraged to apply – for example, professors and instructors who want to incorporate yeast into their undergraduate genetics classrooms; scientists who want to transition from mathematical, computational, or engineering disciplines into bench science; and researchers from small labs or institutions where it would otherwise be difficult to learn the fundamentals of yeast genetics and genomics. Significant stipends (in the 30-50% range of total fees) are available to individuals expressing a need for financial support and who are selected into the course.

Besides its scientific content, the fun and camaraderie at the course is also legendary. In between all the hard work there are late-night chats at the bar and swimming at the beach. There’s a fierce competition between students at the various CSHL courses in the Plate Race, which is a relay in which teams have to carry stacks of 40 Petri dishes (used, of course). There’s also a sailboat trip, a microscopy contest, and a mysterious “Dr. Evil” lab!

Categories: Conferences

Harvesting Until the Last Minute

April 15, 2015

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In the science fiction novel Dune, the most precious thing in the universe is spice. It is harvested from the sands of the planet Dune under very dangerous conditions—every time people start to mine it, a gigantic worm comes to kill them. The spice is so valuable, though, that the miners harvest it until the very last second. As time runs out, a carryall whisks them away as the worm rises out of the desert.

While nothing quite so exciting happens in the nucleus of a yeast cell, one of the closest situations may be at the rDNA locus. Here the precious commodity is ribosomes and yeast cells need them to be made almost constantly. The only pauses in production are when this part of the genome needs to be replicated and when it needs to be segregated into a daughter cell. In both cases, as something akin to giant sandworms comes crashing onto the scene, harvesting stops and the machinery is removed with a cellular carryall.

Of course there aren’t harvesters extracting whole ribosomes from the yeast nucleus! Instead, it is RNA polymerase I (Pol I) and RNA polymerase III (Pol III) making the raw stuff of ribosomes, the 35S and 5S rRNAs, respectively.  These polymerases need to stop transcribing and clear the way for the rDNA replicating replisome during S phase and for condensins at the end of anaphase. If they don’t, the rDNA locus becomes unstable, resulting in the mother yeast cell living a shorter life and in its daughter not getting the rDNA locus (and the rest of the chromosome it is on) at all.

In a new study in Nature Communications, Iacovella and coworkers have identified the carryall that helps to remove Pol I from the rDNA locus. Surprisingly, it is a kinase, named Rio1, that was previously known to be involved in rRNA processing and building ribosomes in the cytoplasm.

Rio1 does not physically remove Pol I from the 35S gene. What this study suggests is that it phosphorylates one of the 14 subunits of Pol I, Rpa43, so that Pol I no longer interacts as strongly with the transcription factor Rrn3. The end result is the untethering of the polymerase and its release from the DNA. Now condensins can glom onto the rDNA locus at the end of anaphase and DNA polymerase can barrel through the region in S phase without wreaking genomic havoc.

The first key finding in this study was that Rio1 isn’t just active in the cytoplasm, but also in the nucleus. In fact, it was most active in the nucleolus, a small moon shaped section of the nucleus that is formed around the rDNA locus. 

The researchers went on to show that Rio1 is present in the nucleolus only at certain times in the cell cycle (S phase and anaphase). Using chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assays, they were able to show that Rio1 was enriched specifically at the rDNA’s 35S promoter and coding sequence.

They next created a conditional Rio1 mutant that could not enter the nucleus in the presence of galactose. When Rio1 was kept out of the nucleus, nucleoli became fragmented, there were no condensins on the rDNA locus at anaphase, and the mother yeast did not pass the replicated nucleolus to her daughter. Obviously Rio1 is a critical housekeeper for the rDNA locus!

They next used ChIP assays to show that when Rio1 was kept out of the nucleus, there was around 3-fold more Pol I at the 35S promoter and gene during anaphase than when Rio1 was allowed to go nuclear. This resulted in a 5-8 fold increase in 35S rRNA levels—implying that Pol I was still there cranking out rRNA.  

The most likely explanation is that all the hyperactive Pol I transcribing the rDNA locus prevents condensins from binding the DNA and that removal of Pol I by Rio1 allows the condensins to bind. The condensins then shrink the rDNA region such that it can move though the tiny bud opening into the daughter.

They got similar results in S phase, where lack of nuclear Rio1 caused an increase in Pol I occupancy at the rDNA and an increase in 35S transcription as well. Here the lack of Rio1 has more devastating consequences to the genome. Its absence most likely causes the replisome to collide head-on with the transcribing Pol I, resulting in double strand DNA breaks. Because the rDNA locus is such a repetitive region, the cell makes mistakes when it repairs the break using homologous recombination. The end result is nucleolar fragmentation and a shorter life span.  

The final set of experiments showed that Rio1 most likely affects Pol I occupancy by phosphorylating one of its subunits, Rpa43. First the authors used Western blot analysis to show that Rpa43 is less phosphorylated when Rio1 is kept out of the nucleus and when a mutant version of Rio1 lacking its kinase function is used. They also showed that Rio1 could phosphorylate Rpa43 in vitro.

They postulate that this phosphorylation causes the interaction between Pol I and the transcription factor Rrn3 to weaken, allowing Pol I release.  Alternatively, Rpa43 phosphorylation could lead to the disintegration of the Pol I enzyme itself. Confirmation of one or the other will require more research.

Taken together, these studies paint a fascinating picture of the rDNA locus. Here Pol I is frenetically transcribing as much 35S rRNA as it possibly can to keep up with the yeast cell’s unquenchable thirst for ribosomes. The only time it stops is when continuing could harm the cell, during DNA replication in S phase and DNA transmission in anaphase. And even then, like spice hunters on Dune, they stay until the very last minute. A spicy tale, indeed.

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

Rise, replisome, rise!

Categories: Research Spotlight

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