Involvement of an SCF(Slmb) complex in timely elimination of E2F upon initiation of DNA replication in Drosophila

BACKGROUND: Cul1 is a core component of the evolutionarily conserved SCF-type ubiquitin ligases that target specific proteins for destruction. SCF action contributes to cell cycle progression but few of the key targets of its action have been identified. RESULTS: We found that expression of the mouse Cul1 (mCul1) in the larval wing disc has a dominant negative effect. It reduces, but does not eliminate, the function of SCF complexes, promotes accumulation of Cubitus interruptus (a target of SCF action), triggers apoptosis, and causes a small wing phenotype. A screen for mutations that dominantly modify this phenotype showed effective suppression upon reduction of E2F function, suggesting that compromised downregulation of E2F contributes to the phenotype. Partial inactivation of Cul1 delayed the abrupt loss of E2F immunofluorescence beyond its normal point of downregulation at the onset of S phase. Additional screens showed that mild reduction in function of the F-box encoding gene slimb enhanced the mCul1 overexpression phenotype. Cell cycle modulation of E2F levels is virtually absent in slimb mutant cells in which slimb function is severely reduced. This implicates Slimb, a known targeting subunit of SCF, in E2F downregulation. In addition, Slimb and E2F interacted in vitro in a phosphorylation-dependent manner. CONCLUSION: We have used genetic and physical interactions to identify the G1/S transcription factor E2F as an SCF(Slmb )target in Drosophila. These results argue that the SCF(Slmb )ubiquitin ligase directs E2F destruction in S phase

Dynamical modelling of phenotypes in a genome-wide RNAi live-cell imaging assay.

International audienceBACKGROUND: The combination of time-lapse imaging of live cells with high-throughput perturbation assays is a powerful tool for genetics and cell biology. The Mitocheck project employed this technique to associate thousands of genes with transient biological phenotypes in cell division, cell death and migration. The original analysis of these data proceeded by assigning nuclear morphologies to cells at each time-point using automated image classification, followed by description of population frequencies and temporal distribution of cellular states through event-order maps. One of the choices made by that analysis was not to rely on temporal tracking of the individual cells, due to the relatively low image sampling frequency, and to focus on effects that could be discerned from population-levelbehaviour. RESULTS: Here, we present a variation of this approach that employs explicit modelling by dynamic differential equations of the cellular state populations. Model fitting to the time course data allowed reliable estimation of the penetrance and time of appearance of four types of disruption of the cell cycle: quiescence, mitotic arrest, polynucleation and cell death. Model parameters yielded estimates of the duration of the interphase and mitosis phases. We identified 2190 siRNAs that induced a disruption of the cell cycle at reproducible times, or increased the durations of the interphase or mitosis phases. CONCLUSIONS: We quantified the dynamic effects of the siRNAs and compiled them as a resource that can be used to characterize the role of their target genes in cell death, mitosis and cell cycle regulation. The described population-based modelling method might be applicable to other large-scale cell-based assays with temporal readout when only population-level measures are available

The Image Data Explorer: Interactive exploration of image-derived data

International audienceMany bioimage analysis projects produce quantitative descriptors of regions of interest in images. Associating these descriptors with visual characteristics of the objects they describe is a key step in understanding the data at hand. However, as many bioimage data and their analysis workflows are moving to the cloud, addressing interactive data exploration in remote environments has become a pressing issue. To address it, we developed the Image Data Explorer (IDE) as a web application that integrates interactive linked visualization of images and derived data points with exploratory data analysis methods, annotation, classification and feature selection functionalities. The IDE is written in R using the shiny framework. It can be easily deployed on a remote server or on a local computer. The IDE is available at https://git.embl.de/heriche/image-data-explorer and a cloud deployment is accessible at https://shiny-portal.embl.de/shinyapps/app/01_image-data-explorer

Profiling DNA damage response following mitotic perturbations

Genome integrity relies on precise coordination between DNA replication and chromosome segregation. Whereas replication stress attracted much attention, the consequences of mitotic perturbations for genome integrity are less understood. Here, we knockdown 47 validated mitotic regulators to show that a broad spectrum of mitotic errors correlates with increased DNA breakage in daughter cells. Unexpectedly, we find that only a subset of these correlations are functionally linked. We identify the genuine mitosis-born DNA damage events and sub-classify them according to penetrance of the observed phenotypes. To demonstrate the potential of this resource, we show that DNA breakage after cytokinesis failure is preceded by replication stress, which mounts during consecutive cell cycles and coincides with decreased proliferation. Together, our results provide a resource to gauge the magnitude and dynamics of DNA breakage associated with mitotic aberrations and suggest that replication stress might limit propagation of cells with abnormal karyotypes.This work was supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF14CC0001 to J.L. and NNF12OC0002088 to C.L.), Danish Cancer Society (R72-A4436 to J.L.), the European Community 6th Framework Programme MitoCheck (LSHG-CT-2004-503464 to J.E.) and European Community 7th Framework Program MitoSys (241548 to J.E.).Peer Reviewe

TreeFam: a curated database of phylogenetic trees of animal gene families

TreeFam is a database of phylogenetic trees of gene families found in animals. It aims to develop a curated resource that presents the accurate evolutionary history of all animal gene families, as well as reliable ortholog and paralog assignments. Curated families are being added progressively, based on seed alignments and trees in a similar fashion to Pfam. Release 1.1 of TreeFam contains curated trees for 690 families and automatically generated trees for another 11 646 families. These represent over 128 000 genes from nine fully sequenced animal genomes and over 45 000 other animal proteins from UniProt; ∼40–85% of proteins encoded in the fully sequenced animal genomes are included in TreeFam. TreeFam is freely available at and

Finding and sharing: new approaches to registries of databases and services for the biomedical sciences

The recent explosion of biological data and the concomitant proliferation of distributed databases make it challenging for biologists and bioinformaticians to discover the best data resources for their needs, and the most efficient way to access and use them. Despite a rapid acceleration in uptake of syntactic and semantic standards for interoperability, it is still difficult for users to find which databases support the standards and interfaces that they need. To solve these problems, several groups are developing registries of databases that capture key metadata describing the biological scope, utility, accessibility, ease-of-use and existence of web services allowing interoperability between resources. Here, we describe some of these initiatives including a novel formalism, the Database Description Framework, for describing database operations and functionality and encouraging good database practise. We expect such approaches will result in improved discovery, uptake and utilization of data resources. Database URL: http://www.casimir.org.uk/casimir_dd

An Open Science Peer Review Oath

One of the foundations of the scientific method is to be able to reproduce experiments and corroborate the results of research that has been done before. However, with the increasing complexities of new technologies and techniques, coupled with the specialisation of experiments, reproducing research findings has become a growing challenge. Clearly, scientific methods must be conveyed succinctly, and with clarity and rigour, in order for research to be reproducible. Here, we propose steps to help increase the transparency of the scientific method and the reproducibility of research results: specifically, we introduce a peer-review oath and accompanying manifesto. These have been designed to offer guidelines to enable reviewers (with the minimum friction or bias) to follow and apply open science principles, and support the ideas of transparency, reproducibility and ultimately greater societal impact. Introducing the oath and manifesto at the stage of peer review will help to check that the research being published includes everything that other researchers would need to successfully repeat the work. Peer review is the lynchpin of the publishing system: encouraging the community to consciously (and conscientiously) uphold these principles should help to improve published papers, increase confidence in the reproducibility of the work and, ultimately, provide strategic benefits to authors and their institutions

Clustering of phosphorylation site recognition motifs can be exploited to predict the targets of cyclin-dependent kinase

Protein kinases are critical to cellular signalling and post-translational gene regulation, but their biological substrates are difficult to identify. We show that cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) consensus motifs are frequently clustered in CDK substrate proteins. Based on this, we introduce a new computational strategy to predict the targets of CDKs and use it to identify new biologically interesting candidates. Our data suggest that regulatory modules may exist in protein sequence as clusters of short sequence motifs