New & Noteworthy
SGD Help Video: Literature Page
October 29, 2015
If you’re interested in finding all the published literature about a gene or protein, there’s no need to wade through long lists of PubMed results. SGD curators have already done that for you! We review PubMed weekly for new papers about S. cerevisiae. You can find papers about a specific gene or protein on its Literature tab page (see an example).
Articles on the Literature page are categorized by several topics. The Primary Literature section lists papers in which the gene of interest is a primary focus of the study, while the Additional Literature section lists papers in which the gene is mentioned but is more peripheral to the research. There are other categories of references, and also a cool interactive graphic that shows the relationships between papers that are about the same set, or overlapping sets, of genes. You can get to the Literature page for a gene or protein via the Literature tab, located at the top of its Locus Summary page and all of its other tab pages.
New SGD Help Video: GO Term Finder
October 26, 2015
Our GO Term Finder tool lets you start with a list of genes—perhaps a set of genes that are co-regulated, or a group of genes that can all mutate to the same phenotype—and analyze their Gene Ontology (GO) annotations to find out what else they might have in common. GO Term Finder searches for significantly shared terms within the GO annotations associated with the genes in your list. It takes advantage of the tree structure of GO to find terms that are related to each other within the ontology.
Finding shared terms within a gene set can bring meaning to experimental results and suggest new avenues to explore. For example, if the GO Term Finder results show that most of the genes in your co-regulated set mediate steps in a pathway, this might be a hint that the uncharacterized genes in the set also participate in that pathway. Or perhaps GO Term Finder will show that a group of genes that can mutate to confer resistance to a certain drug are all annotated to a certain cellular location, suggesting a mechanism for the effects of that drug. Give it a try and see what interesting results your gene list has in store!
Our new SGD Help video gives you a quick overview of how to use the GO Term Finder. You can find all the details on our GO Term Finder help page.
Life Needs to be More Like a 1950′s Chevy
October 21, 2015
Stripped of modern bells and whistles, cars last a lot longer. The same may be true of life. It may last longer when some extra, nonessential genes are removed. Image via Wikimedia Commons
In the old days, a car came with the bare minimum of features to get from point A to point B. The windows rolled down with a crank and it usually had a radio. That was about it.
As the car has evolved, it has gained a huge number of bells and whistles. There are power windows and power brakes, a baffling number of computer-based bonus features, personal wifi hotspots, and so on. All of these have undoubtedly made cars more fun and comfortable to drive. But they have come at a cost. Many cars simply do not last as long as their predecessors because these extras break easily.
Turns out life may be like a modern car. It has lots of nice features that help it to do better in the world. But a lot of these features may shorten its life span.
This point was reinforced in a recent study by McCormick and coworkers. They painstakingly searched through a library of 4,698 single gene deletion strains in S. cerevisiae and found that 238 of these strains were able to produce significantly more buds over their lifetime. Many nonessential genes seem to shorten a yeast’s life.
And boy was it painstaking! Believe it or not, they manually dissected over 2.2 million individual yeast daughter cells to generate these results. Luckily it was worth it, as they found so many interesting things.
First off, many of the genes they found fall into a set of five pathways that includes cytosolic and mitochondrial translation, the SAGA complex, protein mannosylation, the TCA cycle, and proteasomal activity. So there are certain pathways we can target to extend the lifespan of our friend yeast. And even better, yeast may not be the only beneficiary of these studies.
Two of the pathways, cytosolic and mitochondrial translation and the TCA cycle, have also been found to be significant in extending the life of the roundworm C. elegans. These pathways are also shared with humans.
And just because the authors found no overlap with the other three pathways in other beasts doesn’t mean they may not be targets for life extension in them too. It could be that previous screens in C. elegans simply missed genes from these pathways.
It could also be that what is found in yeast may turn out to be important in people but not in C. elegans. For example, the authors failed to find any equivalent to the SAGA complex in C. elegans. Either the roundworm lost this complex during evolution, or the homologs between yeast and C. elegans are so different that they’re unrecognizable. In any event, humans at least do have an equivalent to SAGA, called STAGA.
All of this suggests that there may be common ways to make organisms, including people, live longer, healthier lives. Here’s hoping!
And these five pathways are certainly not the whole story. The majority of the genes McCormick and coworkers identified were not in these five, which means there are probably lots of other ways to get at living longer.
One fascinating example that the authors decided to look at in depth was LOS1. Deleting it had one of the biggest effects on a yeast’s reproductive life span.
At first this seems a little weird, as Los1p exports tRNAs out of the nucleus. As expected, deleting LOS1 led to a buildup in tRNAs in the nucleus. The authors confirmed that this buildup is important by showing that overexpressing MTR10, a gene involved in transporting tRNAs from the cytoplasm to the nucleus, led to a longer lived yeast with a buildup of tRNAs in its nucleus.
The next step was to figure out why having a lot of tRNA in the nucleus makes yeast live longer. It was known previously that Los1p is kept out of the nucleus under glucose starvation conditions. The authors confirmed this result.
Most everyone knows that restricting calorie intake (also called dietary restriction or DR) can extend the lives of most every beast tested so far, including yeast. The authors found that growing a los1 deletion strain at low glucose did not increase the lifespan of this strain any further. It thus appears that an important consequence of DR is keeping Los1p out of the nucleus and thereby increasing the amount of tRNA in the nucleus.
While we don’t know yet exactly why keeping tRNAs in the nucleus helps yeast live longer, it is interesting that the increased lifespan associated with the loss of LOS1 is linked to caloric restriction. Finding a way to inhibit Los1p has to be better than starving yourself!
This study has identified 238 genes to follow up on for future studies. And of course there is a whole class of genes that haven’t yet been investigated—the essential genes! Many of these may be important for extending life too.
Stripping life down to its bare essentials may help individuals live longer at the expense of being the most fit in terms of survival in the hurly burly world of nature. After all, those “nonessential” genes undoubtedly have a function in helping yeast outcompete their less well-endowed yeast neighbors. Just like those power sliding doors are way better than the manual ones on a minivan.
But if you want a long-lived minivan, get the one with the manual doors. And if you want a long-lived yeast (or person), get rid of some of those nonessential genes that cause you to break down.
by D. Barry Starr, Ph.D., Director of Outreach Activities, Stanford Genetics
You Can Take Yeast Off of the Grapevine, But…
October 14, 2015
All over the world and through the ages, people have moved from the country into the big city to look for a better life. These folks often find that even though they can adapt to city life and city ways, they still hang on to their core country values. As the old saying goes, “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.”
Even when he goes to the city, the country mouse hangs on to his country ways. The same is true for S. cerevisiae—even though it entered the lab, it still clung to genes that were most useful out in the vineyard. Illustration by Arthur Rackham (1912) via Wikimedia Commons
Our friend Saccharomyces cerevisiae didn’t migrate voluntarily into the lab. But it ended up there, and has been as lonely as a new migrant in a big city.
Which is of course how we need it to be. One of the basic tenets of classical microbiology is that you can’t begin to study an organism until you’ve isolated it in a pure culture.
And studying pure S. cerevisiae has yielded a huge body of knowledge about molecular biology, cell biology, and genetics. But by not studying yeast in the context of its old country home, we may have missed a few things.
In a new article in PLOS ONE, Rossouw and colleagues uncover one of them. S. cerevisiae has a family of FLO genes that promote flocculation, the adherence of yeast cells to each other. It has always been a bit puzzling why a whole family of genes that are pretty much redundant with each other would be maintained through evolution.
When the researchers took S. cerevisiae out of its lab isolation by mixing it with other yeast species, they found that the different flocculation genes actually determine which species it can co-flocculate with. Different Flo proteins prefer different partners.
This discovery helps us understand the evolution of this gene family and also opens the door to further study of inter-species interactions in the vineyard. And since flocculation is an important property in winemaking and brewing, there could even be tasty practical applications of this knowledge.
The researchers started by surveying 18 non-Saccharomyces yeast strains that are found in vineyards. They looked at the ability of the yeasts to flocculate both as pure strains and when mixed with either of two S. cerevisiae wine strains.
Intriguingly, certain species showed a synergistic effect when mixed with S. cerevisiae, flocculating more than either species on its own. Rossouw and colleagues used microscopy to confirm that the “flocs” did indeed contain both yeast species—a simple observation, since the cells of different species have slightly different shapes.
To test the effects of different FLO genes on co-flocculation, the authors assayed the co-flocculation ability of flo1, flo10, and flo11 deletion mutants as well as Flo1, Flo5, and Flo11 overproducers in individual combinations with six of the non-Saccharomyces yeasts.
The results showed that Flo1 has general effects on flocculation. Overproduction increased co-flocculation across the board with all the species tested, while deletion of FLO1 consistently decreased it. In contrast, deletion of FLO10 didn’t have much effect on co-flocculation.
It was a different story for Flo5 and Flo11, though. Overproduction of each of these not only affected co-flocculation, but had species-specific or even strain-specific effects. Flo5 overproduction caused a relative increase in co-flocculation with Metchnikowia fructicola and a substantial decrease in co-flocculation with two different strains of Hanseniaspora opuntiae. Flo11 overproduction reduced co-flocculation with one of the Hanseniaspora opuntiae strains but not with the other.
All of these experiments were done on mixtures of two species at a time. To get S. cerevisiae even further out of the lab, Rossouw and colleagues created a “consortium” of wine yeasts, a mixture of six species that are found in wine must (freshly pressed grapes) at the start of fermentation. They then added the FLO overproducer strains individually to the consortium, to see their effects in a more natural situation.
They let the yeast consortium flocculate, extracted total DNA from the flocculated or supernatant parts of the culture, and then used automated ribosomal intergenic spacer analysis (ARISA) to see which strains had co-flocculated. This technique can determine the relative abundance of different yeast species in a sample by sequencing a particular region of ribosomal DNA.
In this experiment, overexpression of each of the three FLO genes had significant effects on at least one of the species in the consortium. The species composition of the flocculated yeasts was uniquely different, depending on which gene was overexpressed.
The discovery that the flocculation genes have individual effects on association with other species goes a long way towards explaining why S. cerevisiae has maintained this gene family with so many members that apparently have the same function—at least, when you study a pure culture. Differential regulation of the FLO genes could affect the spectrum of other species that our favorite yeast interacts with.
So, our friend S. cerevisiae didn’t actually get out of the lab in these experiments, but at least it got to rub shoulders with some of its old friends (buds?) from the vineyard. These experiments are a good reminder for researchers to think outside the lab.
And when S. cerevisiae and its friends get together outside the lab, beautiful things can happen. We’ll drink a toast to that!
by Maria Costanzo, Ph.D., Senior Biocuration Scientist, SGD
If yeast could sing about its forced migration to the lab, it might sound like this.