Project description:The hydrolytic deamination of cytosine and 5-methylcytosine drives many of the transition mutations observed in human cancer. The deamination-induced mutagenic intermediates are either uracil or thymine adducts mispaired with guanine. While a substantial array of methods exists to measure other types of DNA adducts, the cytosine deamination adducts pose unusual analytical problems and adequate methods to measure them have not yet been developed. We describe here a novel hybrid thymine DNA glycosylase, hyTDG, which is comprised of a 29-amino acid sequence from human thymine DNA glycosylase linked to a thymine glycosylase found in an archaeal thermophilic bacterium. Using defined-sequence oligonucleotides, we show that hyTDG has robust mispair-selective activity against deaminated U:G and T:G mispairs. We have further developed a method for separating glycosylase-released free bases from oligonucleotides and DNA followed by GC-MS/MS identification and quantification. Using this approach, we have measured for the first time the levels of total Uracil (U), U:G and T:G in calf thymus DNA. The method presented here will allow the measurement of the formation, persistence, and repair of a biologically important class of deaminated cytosine adducts.
Project description:DNA base lesions, such as incorporation of uracil into DNA or base mismatches, can be mutagenic and toxic to replicating cells. To discover factors in repair of genomic uracil, we performed a CRISPR knockout screen in the presence of floxuridine, a chemotherapeutic agent that incorporates uracil and fluoro-uracil into DNA. We identified known factors, such as uracil DNA N-glycosylase (UNG), but also unknown factors, such as the N6-adenosine methyltransferase, METTL3, as required to overcome floxuridine-driven cytotoxicity. Visualized with immunofluorescence, the product of METTL3 activity, N6-methyladenosine, formed nuclear foci in cells treated with floxuridine. The observed N6-methyladenosine was embedded in DNA, called 6mA, which was confirmed using mass spectrometry. METTL3 and 6mA were required for repair of lesions driven by additional base damaging agents, including raltitrexed, gemcitabine, and hydroxyurea. Our results establish a role for METTL3 and 6mA to promote genome stability in mammalian cells, specially in response to base damage.
Project description:The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has been used extensively to study responses to DNA damage. In contrast, little is known about DNA repair in this organism. C. elegans is unusual in that it encodes few DNA glycosylases and the uracil-DNA glycosylase (UDG) encoded by the ung-1 gene is the only known UDG. C. elegans could therefore become a valuable model organism for studies of the genetic interaction networks involving base excision repair (BER). As a first step towards characterization of BER in C. elegans, we show that the UNG-1 protein is an active uracil-DNA glycosylase. We demonstrate that an ung-1 mutant has reduced ability to repair uracil-containing DNA but that an alternative Ugi-inhibited activity is present in ung-1 nuclear extracts. Finally, we demonstrate that ung-1 mutants show altered levels of apoptotic cell corpses formed in response to DNA damaging agents. Increased apoptosis in the ung-1 mutant in response to ionizing radiation (IR) suggests that UNG-1 contributes to repair of IR-induced DNA base damage in vivo. Following treatment with paraquat however, the apoptotic corpse-formation was reduced. Gene expression profiling suggests that this phenotype is a consequence of compensatory transcriptomic shifts that modulate oxidative stress responses in the mutant and not an effect of reduced DNA damage signaling. C. elegans RNAi mutants deficient in ung-1 and the corresponding wild-type N2, were subjected to Affymetrix whole C. elegans genome microarrays. Triplicates were run for each sample group.
Project description:The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has been used extensively to study responses to DNA damage. In contrast, little is known about DNA repair in this organism. C. elegans is unusual in that it encodes few DNA glycosylases and the uracil-DNA glycosylase (UDG) encoded by the ung-1 gene is the only known UDG. C. elegans could therefore become a valuable model organism for studies of the genetic interaction networks involving base excision repair (BER). As a first step towards characterization of BER in C. elegans, we show that the UNG-1 protein is an active uracil-DNA glycosylase. We demonstrate that an ung-1 mutant has reduced ability to repair uracil-containing DNA but that an alternative Ugi-inhibited activity is present in ung-1 nuclear extracts. Finally, we demonstrate that ung-1 mutants show altered levels of apoptotic cell corpses formed in response to DNA damaging agents. Increased apoptosis in the ung-1 mutant in response to ionizing radiation (IR) suggests that UNG-1 contributes to repair of IR-induced DNA base damage in vivo. Following treatment with paraquat however, the apoptotic corpse-formation was reduced. Gene expression profiling suggests that this phenotype is a consequence of compensatory transcriptomic shifts that modulate oxidative stress responses in the mutant and not an effect of reduced DNA damage signaling.
Project description:Meiotic recombination facilitates accurate pairing and faithful segregation of homologous chromosomes by forming physical connections (crossovers) between homologs. Developmentally programmed DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) generated by Spo11 protein (Rec12 in fission yeast) initiate meiotic recombination. Until recently, attempts to address the basis of the highly non-random distribution of DSBs on a genome-wide scale have been limited to 0.1–1 kb resolution of DSB position. We have assessed individual DSB events across the Schizosaccharomyces pombe genome at near-nucleotide resolution by deep-sequencing the short oligonucleotides connected to Rec12 following DNA cleavage. The single oligonucleotide size-class generated by Rec12 allowed us to effectively analyze all break events. Our high-resolution DSB map shows that the influence of underlying nucleotide sequence and chromosomal architecture differs in multiple ways from that in budding yeast. Rec12 action is not strongly restricted to nucleosome-depleted regions but is nevertheless spatially biased with respect to chromatin structure. Furthermore, we find strong evidence across the genome for differential DSB repair previously predicted to account for crossover invariance (constant cM/kb in spite of DSB hotspots). Our genome-wide analyses demonstrate evolutionarily fluid factors contributing to crossover initiation and its regulation.
Project description:HDAC inhibitors (HDACi) belong to a new group of chemotherapeutics that are increasingly used to treat B-cell-derived malignancies. Such malignancies regularly carry mutational signatures that conform to off-target induction of uracil by the AID/APOBEC family of cytidine deaminases, or downstream processing of uracil. . HDACi suppress thymidylate synthase increasing the cellular dUTP/dTTP ratio and leading to increased pressure on uracil repair machinery due to misincorporated uracil lesions. To investigate potential effect upon other enzymes involved in genomic uracil induction and processing, Jurkat (T-cell lymphoma) and SUDHL5 (B-cell lymphoma) cells were treated with pan-HDACi SAHA prior to SILAC based MS/MS investigation. HDACi treatment mediated significant differential expression of xx and xx proteins in Jurkat and SUDHL5, respectively, and had a substantial impact upon enzymes involved in in pyrimidine metabolism. Surprisingly, uracil N-glycosylase, UNG, was strongly downregulated by HDACi treatment. Further analysis in HEK and HeLa cells revealed that HDACis induce specific loss of the nuclear isoform UNG2 independent of transcription and cell-cycle alterations. More than 80% of UNG2 is degraded proteasomally after 24 hours treatment with SAHA, MS275, Valproate or Na-butyrate, indicating a universal ability of HDACis to mediate loss of UNG2. Targeted MS/MS analysis in HEK cells against a panel of proteins involved in DNA repair, translesion synthesis and nucleotide metabolism, revealed that UNG2 was the most pronounced differentially expressed among these after HDACi treatment. 48 hour treatment lead to a 30-40% increase in uracil lesions in the nuclear genome of HeLa and HEK cells and MS275 treatment in murine CH12F3 cell line mediated robust UNG2-loss accompanied by reduced class switch recombination. Furthermore, our analysis identified the PCNA-associated factor PAF15 among the downregulated proteins. PAF15 is overexpressed in many cancers and suppress TLS by inducing double monoubiquitinylation of PCNA and recruitment of the replicative polymerases. In summary, our findings demonstrate that HDAC inhibition affects the levels of proteins involved in DNA base excision repair, translesion synthesis and pyrimidine metabolism. These findings are important for a wide range of clinical applications of HDACi, such as in rheumatology, HIV-, and cancer treatment.
Project description:Polyploidy has been implicated in genome instability and tumorigenesis. We use Schizosaccharomyces pombe diploids as a model for studying the consequences of whole genome duplications on genome integrity. In this study, our aim is to investigate the transcriptional profile between haploid and diploid S. pombe in unperturbed and MMS treated conditions (0.0075% MMS, 4 hours @ 32 degrees Celsius in YES media).