New & Noteworthy
Pinpointing Peroxisomes
August 14, 2014
The contents of the cell certainly move around, but they’re not quite as mobile as the blobs in this lava lamp. Image from Wikimedia Commons
One way to think about the cell is that organelles float around in it like those globs in a lava lamp. This is obviously a simplification, but it’s also true that organelles aren’t locked into place. As usual, the real picture lies somewhere in between these two extremes.
What we know about the architecture of the cell has mostly been discovered using classical cell biology and genetic techniques. But in a paper published in Molecular BioSystems, Cohen et al. uncovered some very interesting small details using a very large-scale approach.
The authors were interested in peroxisomes, where a lot of critical metabolic reactions happen (or fail to happen, in several human diseases). The researchers were able to see that peroxisomes not only interact with other organelles, but they contact the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and mitochondria in a way that could be extremely important for cellular metabolism. And surprisingly, it was by combining a variety of different high-throughput techniques that Cohen and colleagues could uncover this fine structure.
The first step was to set up two reporter constructs to look for genes involved in two different peroxisomal processes.
One reporter was a red fluorescent protein, mCherry, modified to carry a peroxisomal targeting signal and show whether import into peroxisomes was normal. Another reporter, a peroxisomal membrane protein (Ant1p) tagged with green fluorescent protein (GFP), would show whether peroxisomal membranes were normal.
The reporters were crossed into mutant collections, creating one strain for each gene in the genome that had either a complete deletion (for nonessential genes) or a knock-down allele (for essential genes), plus both reporters. Now the researchers could systematically test for genes that, when mutated, affected one or both of these aspects of peroxisomal biogenesis.
To visualize the mutant phenotypes, they used a sophisticated technique termed “high-content screening.” This is an automated way to analyze micrographs that both pinpoints the intracellular location of a fluorescent reporter and measures its quantity. Screening the mutant collection in this way showed that 56 strains had altered distribution of the two different reporter proteins. Some had a reduction in peroxisomal protein import (mCherry fluorescence), while some had fewer or no peroxisomes and some had peroxisomes that were smaller than normal (GFP fluorescence).
One result that caught the researchers’ eyes was that one of the strains with smaller peroxisomes had a mutation in the MDM10 gene. Mdm10p is part of the ERMES (ER-Mitochondria Encounter Structure) complex that tethers mitochondria to the ER, and this wasn’t previously known to have any connection with peroxisomes. Strains that were mutant in other ERMES subunits had the same phenotype, confirming that the complex has something to do with peroxisome structure. Other results from the screens added weight to the idea of a three-way connection between peroxisomes, the ER, and mitochondria, and the authors went on to show that peroxisomes often sit at the ERMES complex where mitochondria contact the ER.
Next, to test whether mitochondria might have specific subdomains where peroxisomes interact, the authors used yet another large-scale screen. In the C-terminal GFP fusion library, where each yeast open reading frame is C-terminally tagged with GFP, 96 strains showed a punctate pattern of the fluorescent signal – meaning that the protein was concentrated in spots, rather than evenly distributed. They labeled the mitochondria with a red fluorescent marker protein in these strains and, again using the high-content screening system, identified protein spots that co-localized with mitochondria. The most intense hit was for Pda1p, a subunit of the mitochondrial enzyme pyruvate dehydrogenase (PDH), and a similar result was obtained for another PDH subunit. So PDH isn’t distributed uniformly in the mitochondrion, but is instead concentrated in clusters.
Looking more closely using the various reporter constructs in their collections, the authors found that peroxisomes and the ERMES complex most often co-localized with those mitochondrial globs of PDH. It would make metabolic sense for peroxisomes to hang out near PDH on mitochondria because this could increase the local concentration of metabolites that they both use.
Intriguingly, Cohen et al. also found that mitochondria and peroxisomes co-localized in mammalian cells. Given that many diseases are linked to peroxisomal metabolism, this is an important avenue to investigate.
So while organelles don’t float around in the cell quite as fluidly as the globs in a lava lamp, the data generated from large-scale approaches boiled down to learning some very fine-grained detail about cellular architecture. We think that’s, like, groovy.
by Maria Costanzo, Ph.D., Senior Biocurator, SGD
Categories: Research Spotlight Yeast and Human Disease
Tags: endoplasmic reticulum , mitochondria , peroxisomes , Saccharomyces cerevisiae