New & Noteworthy
Flip-Flopping Yeasts
June 20, 2013
We all have certain things we can’t live without. But what’s essential to one person may be completely trivial to another. For example, a teenager who can’t live without his video games is fine without that antique tea set, while the opposite may be true for grandma.
Just like all of the pieces of this set are essential to grandma, so too are all of the proteins in an essential complex usually essential to yeast (and maybe to us too!).
In a new article in Genome Biology and Evolution, Ryan and coworkers find that the same holds true for different yeast species. One gene that is essential in one yeast is dispensable in another. And furthermore, they tend to be essential or nonessential in sets. Just like grandma’s tea set and the teenager’s games.
It’s been seen in S. cerevisiae that the genes that encode the proteins in a complex tend to be either mostly essential or mostly nonessential. It is like the teapot and the cups and saucers all being essential to grandma or all being nonessential to the teenager. This is called modular essentiality.
Ryan and coworkers found that if some protein complex is essential in one yeast, most or all of those genes will be essential in that species. On the other hand, if that protein complex is dispensable in a different yeast, then most or all of those genes will be nonessential. The genes encoding the entire complex flip together from essential to nonessential – again, just like the tea set. It isn’t as if one of the tea cups happens to stay essential when the teenager gets ahold of the set!
To do this work, Ryan and coworkers started out by looking at S. cerevisiae. As all of us here at SGD know, this was an excellent choice! But not just because we work on it…
Because the S. cerevisiae genome sequence has been available for quite a while, we know which genes are essential to life, which genes interact genetically, and which proteins interact physically with each other. We also have a very good list of the protein complexes that exist in yeast and what their subunits are.
Ryan and coworkers used updated data to confirm that modular essentiality exists in S. cerevisiae. Most of the proteins in an essential complex tend to come from essential genes and most of the proteins in nonessential complexes come from nonessential genes. There is very little overlap…the tea set does not often contain a video game!
Next the authors asked whether this modular essentiality is found in other species too. At the moment, Schizosaccharomyces pombe, or fission yeast, is the only other eukaryote with complete data on the essentiality of genes. Although it’s also a single-celled yeast, S. pombe is about as far away from S. cerevisiae as you can get and still be a yeast. The two are thought to have diverged as much as 400 million years ago.
Even though it is so different, S. pombe also shows modular essentiality. And using an incomplete set of data from knockout mice, the authors see a similar pattern! So it looks like modular essentiality is at least conserved across fungi, and may be universal.
Next they asked if complexes that have flipped from essential to nonessential over time still maintain their modular essentiality. Do all the tea cups become nonessential, or just some of them?
When grandma tidies up the video games, none of them will seem important to her. The same thing happens when a complex switches from essential to nonessential as a species evolves.
Most (83%) of the genes that are present as one-to-one orthologs in both yeasts are either essential in both or nonessential in both. Ryan and coworkers focused on the other 17%, where a gene was essential in one species but not in the other.
In the cases where essentiality is “flipped” between the species, whole protein complexes tend to flip as a unit. The subunits of a complex that is nonessential in budding yeast are mostly nonessential, while the subunits of the analogous complex in fission yeast are mostly essential.
An example of this is the large subunit of the mitochondrial ribosome. Mitochondrial translation is optional for S. cerevisiae, but obligatory for S. pombe. In keeping with this, almost all the proteins that make up the S. cerevisiae large mitochondrial ribosomal subunit are nonessential. In S. pombe, the situation is flipped.
So the essentiality of a complex mirrors the lifestyle of its owner, just like the teenager and his grandmother. The two yeasts, with their different lifestyles, place different importance on the mitochondrial ribosome. This wasn’t a big surprise, since this lifestyle difference was already known. But other complexes that are flipped between the species may point to things that we don’t yet know about their physiology.
These results support the idea that modular essentiality is universal, which would mean that in various organisms we can expect that mutants in subunits of a complex will share the same phenotype, disease association, and drug sensitivity. Obviously there are important implications here for antifungal drug design or for disease treatment: if you want to stop a complex from working, any of its subunits (or perhaps several at the same time) might prove to be good targets.
But another bigger point is how much we can learn from a deep understanding of an organism’s genome. By teasing apart what is essential and what isn’t we can learn a lot about the beast we’re studying. And someday, maybe a lot about ourselves.
by Maria Costanzo, Ph.D., Senior Biocurator, SGD
Categories: Research Spotlight