New & Noteworthy

Where’s That Protein?

July 01, 2015


Waldo will always be hard to find, but we now know exactly where to find more than 4,000 S. cerevisiae proteins, thanks to new methods and an analysis pipeline. Image by William Murphy via Wikimedia Commons

You might be familiar with the Where’s Waldo book series, especially (but not necessarily) if you have kids. They challenge the reader to find Waldo within huge, intricately drawn groups of people. Even though Waldo has his distinctive characteristics—glasses and a striped shirt and hat—he can be very hard to find.

Now imagine that the drawings shift under different conditions, so that Waldo could be in any of several places at different times. And imagine that you’re not just looking for Waldo, but also for thousands of other unique individuals—all tagged in the same way. This is the challenge faced by researchers who want to know where each protein in a cell is located and how its location and abundance respond to different environments.

But, as genetic, robotic, microscopic, and computational tools get more and more sophisticated, it’s becoming possible to pinpoint Waldo and his companions even as they move around within the jam-packed yeast cell.

In two new papers, scientists from the University of Toronto describe a huge effort that entailed over 9 billion quantitative measurements to find the location and measure the abundance of more than 4,000 S. cerevisiae proteins. Chong and colleagues wrote in Cell about the approach and experimental methods, while Koh and colleagues published in G3 about the computational methods and the database that houses all the data, called CYCLoPs for Collection of Yeast Cells and Localization Patterns.

This work couldn’t have been done without a valuable resource that was created some years ago: the yeast GFP collection. It’s a set of strains, each with the green fluorescent protein gene fused to the 3’ end of one open reading frame to express a GFP fusion protein from the ORF’s native promoter. Not every yeast protein can be detected this way: some are expressed too weakly, while others may actually be destabilized by their GFP tags. Still, more than 4,100 of these fusion genes—71% of the proteome—give a visible GFP signal in the cell.

The researchers started with these ~4,100 strains and transformed each with a plasmid expressing red fluorescent protein. This allowed them to visualize the boundaries of each cell. Then they got to work, taking pictures of at least 200 cells of each strain and developing an automated pipeline to analyze them. They ended up analyzing 300,000 micrographs of more than 20 million cells, beating the few dozen Where’s Waldo books by a long shot!

The scientists looked at each protein in wild type, in a mutant strain, and in the presence of two drugs. The mutant strain they studied was deleted for RPD3, which encodes a lysine deacetylase that regulates the stability and interactions of histones and other proteins. The drug treatments were done with several different concentrations of rapamycin (an inhibitor of the TORC1 complex, which is an important regulator of cell growth) or hydroxyurea (a DNA replication inhibitor).

The end result was an enormous collection of data, now stored in the CYCLoPs database, that shows the abundance of each protein in each of 16 cellular compartments under all of these different conditions. These data are much more quantitative and consistent than any protein abundance or localization data that had been obtained before. They are stored in such a way that measurements within single cells can be accessed, and the database can be searched by patterns of changes in localization or abundance as well as for data on a particular protein.

The authors came up with some innovative methods for visualizing this immense dataset to get a high-level overview. One of their most surprising findings was just how many proteins localize to multiple places. We tend to think of the cell as a tidy place where each protein has one particular location, but Chong and colleagues found that it’s extremely common for proteins to be in several spots.

Most often, when proteins are present in more than one place, those places are the nucleus and the cytoplasm. Some proteins had already been shown in small-scale studies to be present in both compartments, or to shuttle between them. But the authors saw an astounding 1,029 proteins localizing to both the nucleus and cytoplasm under standard conditions in wild-type cells.

Not counting the proteins in the nucleus and cytoplasm, another 511 proteins localized to more than one place. Some were seen in up to five different subcellular compartments.

The proteins with multiple locations, as a group, were more likely than the average protein to be phosphorylated. This made sense, because phosphorylation of proteins is known to regulate their localization. And many of these proteins themselves had regulatory roles, controlling processes such as cell division.

The fact that data were collected from single cells means that we can use them to uncover the dynamics of protein movement. For example, if a protein was scored as localizing to both the nucleus and the cytoplasm, does that mean there’s a pool of it in both places at all times, or does it move back and forth? The single-cell data for two representative proteins, Mcm2 and Whi5, showed clearly that any one cell has each of these proteins in either the nucleus or cytoplasm, but not both. But some other proteins hang out in both places at once. And the dynamics of still more roving proteins are just waiting to be revealed.

Researchers will be mining the CYCLoPs resource to find detailed information about specific proteins, pathways, and processes for years to come. The data gathered in the rpd3 mutant and under rapamycin and hydroxyurea treatment served as proof of principle that the system can be used to assess the effects of a variety of mutations and drugs.

So this study puts a spotlight on Waldo in each picture and makes it simple to find him and his friends. This mass of data on where proteins are and how they move around has far-reaching implications for yeast systems biology, and the methodology can now be applied to cells of other organisms as well. In the coming weeks, we’ll make it even simpler for you to access these data from SGD, by adding links for individual proteins to the CYCLoPs database.

by Maria Costanzo, Ph.D., Senior Biocuration Scientist, SGD

Categories: Research Spotlight

Tags: protein abundance, protein localization, Saccharomyces cerevisiae

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