New & Noteworthy
Yeast Genetics Makes Awesome Sauce
January 08, 2015
Just as many different combinations of ingredients can make a homemade tomato sauce, many different combinations of alleles can mitigate the effects of a devastating mutation. Image via Pixabay.com
What’s for dinner tonight? For many of us the answer will be “pasta with tomato sauce”, even if we don’t have Italian roots.
But as you know, there isn’t any single recipe for homemade tomato sauce. Onions and garlic, or just garlic? Pork, beef, or no meat at all? How many bay leaves go in the pot? Every cook will use a slightly different combination of ingredients, but all will end up with tomato sauce.
When it comes to combining different allele variants to survive a lethal challenge, yeast is a lot like those cooks. In a new paper in GENETICS, Sirr and colleagues used divergent yeast strains to generate a wide range of allelic backgrounds and found that there is more than one way to survive a deadly mutation in the GAL7 gene. Just as there is more than one way to make a delicious tomato sauce…
This isn’t just an academic exercise either. GAL7 is the ortholog of the human GALT gene, which when mutated leads to the disease galactosemia. And just like in yeast, people with different genetic backgrounds may do better or worse when both copies of their GALT gene are mutated.
GAL7 and GALT encode an enzyme, galactose-1-phosphate uridyl transferase, that breaks down the sugar galactose. If people with this mutation eat galactose, the toxic compound galactose-1-phosphate accumulates; this can cause serious symptoms or even death. The same is often true for yeast with a mutated GAL7 gene.
Ideally we would want to be able to predict how severe the symptoms of galactosemia would be, based on a patient’s genetic background. So far, though, it’s been a challenge to identify comprehensively the whole set of genes that affect a given human phenotype. Which is why Sirr and colleagues turned to our friend S. cerevisiae to study alleles affecting the highly conserved galactose utilization pathway.
The researchers started with two very divergent yeast strains, one isolated from a canyon in Israel and the other from an oak tree in Pennsylvania. Both were able to utilize galactose normally, but the scientists made them “galactosemic” by knocking out the GAL7 gene in each.
After mating the strains to create a galactosemic diploid, the researchers needed to let the strain sporulate and isolate haploid progeny. But its sporulation efficiency wasn’t very good, only about 20%. And they needed to have millions of progeny to get a comprehensive look at genetic backgrounds.
To isolate a virtually pure population of haploid progeny, Sirr and coworkers came up with a neat trick. They added a green fluorescent protein gene to the strain and put it under control of a sporulation-specific promoter.
Cells that were undergoing sporulation would fluoresce and could be separated from the others by fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS). The FACS technique also allowed sorting by size, so they could select complete tetrads containing four haploid spores and discard incomplete products of meiosis such as dyads containing only two spores.
After using this step to isolate tetrads, the researchers broke them open to free the spores and put them on Petri dishes containing galactose—an amount that was enough to kill either of the parent strains. One in a thousand spores was able to survive the galactose toxicity. Recombination between the divergent alleles from the two parent strains somehow came up with the right combination of alleles for a survival sauce.
Sirr and colleagues individually genotyped 247 of the surviving progeny, using partial genome sequencing. They mapped QTLs (quantitative trait loci) to identify genomic regions associated with survival. If they found a particular allele in the survivors more often than would be expected by chance, that was a clue that a gene in that region had a role in survival.
We don’t have the space here to do justice to the details of the results, but we can summarize by saying that a whole variety of factors contributed to the galactose tolerance of the surviving progeny. They had three major QTLs, regions where multiple alleles were over- or under-represented. The QTLs were centered on genes involved in sugar metabolism: GAL3 and GAL80, both involved in transcriptional regulation of galactose utilization genes, and three hexose transporter genes (HXT3, HXT6, and HXT7) that are located very close to each other.
It makes sense that all of these genes could affect galactosemia. Gal3p and Gal80p are regulators of the pathway, so alleles of these genes that make galactose catabolism less active would result in less production of toxic intermediates. And although the hexose transporters don’t transport galactose as their preferred substrates, they may induce the pathway by allowing a little galactose into the cell. So less active alleles of these transporters would also result in less galactose catabolism.
Another event that occurred in over half of the surviving progeny was aneuploidy (altered chromosome number), most often an extra copy of chromosome XIII where the GAL80 gene is located. The same three QTL peaks were also seen in the disomic strains, though, leading the authors to conclude that the extra chromosome alone was not sufficient for survival of galactosemia.
And finally, some rare non-genetic events contributed to survival of the progeny. The authors discovered this when they found that the galactose tolerance of some of the progeny wasn’t stably inherited. This could result from differences in protein levels between individual cells. For example, if one cell happened to have lower levels of a galactose transporter than other cells, it might be more resistant to galactose.
The take-home message here is that there are many different ways to get to the same phenotype. The new method that they developed allowed the researchers to see rare combinations of alleles in large numbers of individual progeny, in contrast to other genotyping methods where progeny are pooled and only the average can be detected.
For any disease or trait the ultimate goal is to identify all the alleles of all the genes that influence it. Imagine the impact on human health, if we could look at a person’s genotype and accurately predict their phenotype!
So far, it’s been a challenge to identify these large sets of human genes in a comprehensive way. But this approach using yeast could provide a feast of data to help us understand monogenic diseases like galactosemia, cystic fibrosis, porphyria, and many more, and maybe even more complex traits and diseases. Now that’s an appetizing prospect for human disease researchers. Buon appetito!
by Maria Costanzo, Ph.D., Senior Biocurator, SGD
Categories: Research Spotlight, Yeast and Human Disease
Tags: galactosemia, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, yeast model for human disease