New & Noteworthy

Slipping Through Haldane’s Sieve

May 22, 2014

Just as harsh panning can uncover hidden gold nuggets, so too can loss of heterozygosity reveal beneficial new recessive mutations. Image via Wikimedia Commons

Imagine you are panning for gold in a river and there are two kinds of nuggets.  One type is naked gold while the other is gold hidden inside of normal rock.  Pretty easy to figure out which nuggets you’ll gather first!

Now imagine instead that the process of panning is a rough one that knocks the shell off of the second type of nugget revealing the gold inside.  Now there won’t be any difference between the two.  You will be just as likely to keep both types of nuggets.

The same sort of situation applies to new beneficial mutations in a changing environment.  Back in 1927, J. B. S. Haldane predicted that the more dominant a mutation, the more likely it was to help a diploid beast adapt to a new environment.  The naked gold was more likely to be taken over the covered gold.

Gerstein and coworkers show in a new study that at least in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Haldane’s sieve (as it is called) may not always apply.  The process of adapting to a new environment can strip away the dominant older allele, revealing the recessive one.  Loss of heterozygosity (LOH) uncovers the hidden gold of the recessive phenotype.

The authors had previously identified haploid mutants that were able to survive in the presence of the fungicide nystatin.  They mated these mutants to create either heterozygotes or homozygous recessive mutants and compared these to wild-type diploids growing either in the presence or absence of nystatin. 

Gerstein and coworkers found a wide range of effects of these mutations in the absence of nystatin.  Sometimes heterozygotes grew better than either homozygote, sometimes homozygous recessive strains did best, and sometimes wild type grew best.   Phenotypes were all over the map.

The story was very different in the presence of nystatin where only the homozygous recessives managed to grow.  This appears to contradict Haldane’s sieve.  Here there were no dominant mutations that allowed for survival.

Gerstein and coworkers found that some heterozygote replicates started to grow after a prolonged lag period.  A closer look at the heterozygotes that grew showed that they had lost the dominant allele so that they could now show the recessive phenotype and survive.  LOH had broken Haldane’s sieve. 

The authors found that the lower the nystatin levels, the more likely a population was to break through Haldane’s sieve.  They postulate that the populations survive longer at lower levels of nystatin, which increases the chances that a LOH will happen.  It is a race between survival and eliminating the dominant allele that keeps them from growing. 

The next step was to determine if LOH was common enough that populations with a small percentage of heterozygotes could survive.  They found that even in populations where only 2% were heterozygotes, around 5% of the 96 replicate populations managed to lose an allele and grow.  So even at low levels, a recessive mutation can give a population the advantage it needs to adapt and survive.

Combining the awesome power of yeast genetics with cheap sequencing is allowing scientists to test fundamental models of genetics that will unearth how populations adapt and survive in new environments.  We are finding those nuggets of scientific knowledge that have remained hidden.

Now of course, not every diploid is as numerous or as genetically flexible as yeast.  Cows, chickens, lizards, and people may all still be slaves to Haldane’s sieve.  We will need more studies to see if our recessive treasures can be uncovered in time to save us. 

by D. Barry Starr, Ph.D., Director of Outreach Activities, Stanford Genetics

Categories: Research Spotlight

Tags: antifungal resistance , evolution , Saccharomyces cerevisiae