Evolution of Robustness to Protein Mistranslation by Accelerated Protein Turnover

Translational errors occur at high rates, and they influence organism viability and the onset of genetic diseases. To investigate how organisms mitigate the deleterious effects of protein synthesis errors during evolution, a mutant yeast strain was engineered to translate a codon ambiguously (mistranslation). It thereby overloads the protein quality-control pathways and disrupts cellular protein homeostasis. This strain was used to study the capacity of the yeast genome to compensate the deleterious effects of protein mistranslation. Laboratory evolutionary experiments revealed that fitness loss due to mistranslation can rapidly be mitigated. Genomic analysis demonstrated that adaptation was primarily mediated by large-scale chromosomal duplication and deletion events, suggesting that errors during protein synthesis promote the evolution of genome architecture. By altering the dosages of numerous, functionally related proteins simultaneously, these genetic changes introduced large phenotypic leaps that enabled rapid adaptation to mistranslation. Evolution increased the level of tolerance to mistranslation through acceleration of ubiquitin-proteasome–mediated protein degradation and protein synthesis. As a consequence of rapid elimination of erroneous protein products, evolution reduced the extent of toxic protein aggregation in mistranslating cells. However, there was a strong evolutionary trade-off between adaptation to mistranslation and survival upon starvation: the evolved lines showed fitness defects and impaired capacity to degrade mature ribosomes upon nutrient limitation. Moreover, as a response to an enhanced energy demand of accelerated protein turnover, the evolved lines exhibited increased glucose uptake by selective duplication of hexose transporter genes. We conclude that adjustment of proteome homeostasis to mistranslation evolves rapidly, but this adaptation has several side effects on cellular physiology. Our work also indicates that translational fidelity and the ubiquitin-proteasome system are functionally linked to each other and may, therefore, co-evolve in nature. © 2015 Kalapis et al

Highly conserved proximal promoter element harbouring paired Sox9-binding sites contributes to the tissue- and developmental stage-specific activity of the matrilin-1 gene

The matrilin-1 gene has the unique feature that it is expressed in chondrocytes in a developmental stage-specific manner. Previously, we found that the chicken matrilin-1 long promoter with or without the intronic enhancer and the short promoter with the intronic enhancer restricted the transgene expression to the columnar proliferative chondroblasts and prehypertrophic chondrocytes of growth-plate cartilage in transgenic mice. To study whether the short promoter shared by these transgenes harbours cartilage-specific control elements, we generated transgenic mice expressing the LacZ reporter gene under the control of the matrilin-1 promoter between −338 and +67. Histological analysis of the founder embryos demonstrated relatively weak transgene activity in the developing chondrocranium, axial and appendicular skeleton with highest level of expression in the columnar proliferating chondroblasts and prehypertrophic chondrocytes. Computer analysis of the matrilin-1 genes of amniotes revealed a highly conserved Pe1 (proximal promoter element 1) and two less-conserved sequence blocks in the distal promoter region. The inverted Sox motifs of the Pe1 element interacted with chondrogenic transcription factors Sox9, L-Sox5 and Sox6 in vitro and another factor bound to the spacer region. Point mutations in the Sox motifs or in the spacer region interfered with or altered the formation of nucleoprotein complexes in vitro and significantly decreased the reporter gene activity in transient expression assays in chondrocytes. In vivo occupancy of the Sox motifs in genomic footprinting in the expressing cell type, but not in fibroblasts, also supported the involvement of Pe1 in the tissue-specific regulation of the gene. Our results indicate that interaction of Pe1 with distal DNA elements is required for the high level, cartilage- and developmental stage-specific transgene expression