New & Noteworthy

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

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

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!

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!