New & Noteworthy
Once You Start Looking, Shu2 Homologs Are Everywhere
April 09, 2015
Once you notice the first robin of the spring, you see them everywhere. And once you notice an important protein, you might well find it all over the evolutionary tree. Image by Jerry Friedman via Wikimedia Commons
Have you ever heard of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon? (Don’t worry, we hadn’t either!) But you’ve surely experienced it.
The phenomenon describes the experience of suddenly seeing something everywhere, after you’ve noticed it for the first time. For those of us in Northern climates, it’s like like robins coming back in the springtime: one day, you see a single robin hopping on the grass; the next day, you look around and realize they’re all over.
Something similar happened to Godin and colleagues as they investigated the S. cerevisiae Shu2 protein. People knew about the protein and its SWIM domain but no one had looked to see just how conserved it was.
When the researchers looked for homologous proteins that contained the characteristic SWIM domain, they found homologs in everything from Archaea through primitive eukaryotes, fungi, plants, and animals. They were practically everywhere (in the evolutionary sense).
In a new paper in GENETICS, Godin and coworkers described their studies on this relatively little-studied, unsung protein. They found that it is an important player in the essential process of DNA double-strand break repair via homologous recombination, and its SWIM domain is critical to this function. Not only that, but being able to compare the SWIM domains from so many different homologs allowed them to refine its consensus sequence, identifying a previously unrecognized alanine within the domain was both highly conserved and very important.
Double-strand DNA breaks (DSBs) can happen because of exposure to DNA damaging agents, but they are also formed normally during meiotic recombination, in which a nuclease actually cuts chromosomes to start the process. Homologous recombination to repair DSBs is a key part of both mitosis and meiosis.
During homologous recombination, one strand of each broken DNA end is nibbled back to form a single-stranded region. This region is then coated with a DNA-binding protein or proteins, forming filaments that are necessary for those ends to find homologous regions and for the DSB to be repaired.
Shu2 is one of the proteins that participates in the formation of these filaments in S. cerevisiae. It was known that it was part of a complex called the Shu complex, and a human homolog, SWS1, had been identified. But the exact role of Shu2 and the significance of the SWIM (SWI2/SNF2 and MuDR) zinc finger-like domain that it contains were open questions.
One of the first questions the authors asked was whether Shu2 was widely conserved across the tree of life. Genes with similar sequences had been seen in fission yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe) and humans, but no one had searched systematically for orthologs. They used PSI-BLAST, a variation of the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) algorithm that that is very good at finding distantly related proteins, to search all available sequences.
Querying with both yeast Shu2 and human SWS1, the researchers found hits all across the tree of life—both in “lower” organisms such as Archaea, protozoa, algae, oomycetes, slime molds, and fungi, and in more complex organisms like fruit flies, nematode worms, and plants. The homologous proteins that they found across all these species also had the SWIM domain, suggesting that it might be important.
The sequence similarity was all well and good, but did these putative Shu2 orthologs actually do the same job in other organisms that Shu2 does in yeast? One way to test this is to do co-evolutionary analysis. Proteins that work together are subject to the same evolutionary pressures, so they tend to evolve at similar rates. Godin and colleagues found that evolutionary rates of the members of the Shu complex in fungi and fruit fly did generally correlate with those of other proteins involved in mitosis and meiosis.
The awesome power of yeast genetics offered Godin and coworkers a way to look at the function of Shu2. They first tested the phenotype of the shu2 null mutation, and found that it decreased the efficiency of forming filaments of the Rad51 DNA-binding protein on the single-stranded DNA ends that are created at DSBs. Formation of these filaments is a necessary step in repairing the DSBs by homologous recombination.
The comparison of SWIM domains from so many different proteins highlighted one particular alanine residue. This alanine hadn’t previously been considered part of the domain’s consensus sequence, but it was conserved in all the domains.
When the researchers changed the invariant alanine residue in yeast Shu2, the mutant protein bound less strongly to its interaction partner in the Shu complex, Psy3. When they mutated the analogous residue in the human Shu2 ortholog SWS1, this also decreased its binding to its partner, SWSAP1.
Other mutations within the SWIM domain of Shu2 also affected its interactions with other members of the Shu complex, and made the mutant cells especially sensitive to the DNA-damaging agent MMS. Diploid cells with a homozygous mutation in the Shu2 SWIM domain had very poor spore viability, suggesting that the SWIM domain is important for normal meiosis.
As one more indication of the SWIM domain’s importance, Godin and colleagues took a look in the COSMIC database, which collects the sequences of mutations found in cancer cells. Sure enough, a human cancer patient carried a mutation in that invariant alanine residue of the SWIM domain in the Shu2 ortholog, SWS1.
There’s still much more to be done to figure out exactly what Shu2 and the Shu complex are doing during homologous recombination. Yeast obviously provides a wonderful experimental system, and the discovery of Shu2 orthologs in two other model organisms that also have awesomely powerful genetics and happen to be multicellular, Drosophila melanogaster and Caenorhabditis elegans, expands the experimental possibilities even further.
There’s also a lot to be learned about the SWIM domain in particular. The discoveries that it affects the binding behavior of these proteins and that it is mutated in a cancer patient show that it’s very important, but just what does it do in Shu2? It will be fascinating to find out exactly how this domain works to help cells recover from the lethal danger of broken chromosomes. And it is amazing what you can see, once you start looking.
by Maria Costanzo, Ph.D., Senior Biocurator, SGD
Categories: Research Spotlight
Tags: evolution , homologous recombination , model organism , Saccharomyces cerevisiae