18 research outputs found

    TNPO2 variants associate with human developmental delays, neurologic deficits, and dysmorphic features and alter TNPO2 activity in Drosophila

    Get PDF
    Transportin-2 (TNPO2) mediates multiple pathways including non-classical nucleocytoplasmic shuttling of >60 cargoes, such as developmental and neuronal proteins. We identified 15 individuals carrying de novo coding variants in TNPO2 who presented with global developmental delay (GDD), dysmorphic features, ophthalmologic abnormalities, and neurological features. To assess the nature of these variants, functional studies were performed in Drosophila. We found that fly dTnpo (orthologous to TNPO2) is expressed in a subset of neurons. dTnpo is critical for neuronal maintenance and function as downregulating dTnpo in mature neurons using RNAi disrupts neuronal activity and survival. Altering the activity and expression of dTnpo using mutant alleles or RNAi causes developmental defects, including eye and wing deformities and lethality. These effects are dosage dependent as more severe phenotypes are associated with stronger dTnpo loss. Interestingly, similar phenotypes are observed with dTnpo upregulation and ectopic expression of TNPO2, showing that loss and gain of Transportin activity causes developmental defects. Further, proband-associated variants can cause more or less severe developmental abnormalities compared to wild-type TNPO2 when ectopically expressed. The impact of the variants tested seems to correlate with their position within the protein. Specifically, those that fall within the RAN binding domain cause more severe toxicity and those in the acidic loop are less toxic. Variants within the cargo binding domain show tissue-dependent effects. In summary, dTnpo is an essential gene in flies during development and in neurons. Further, proband-associated de novo variants within TNPO2 disrupt the function of the encoded protein. Hence, TNPO2 variants are causative for neurodevelopmental abnormalities

    Multiple Means to the Same End: The Genetic Basis of Acquired Stress Resistance in Yeast

    Get PDF
    In nature, stressful environments often occur in combination or close succession, and thus the ability to prepare for impending stress likely provides a significant fitness advantage. Organisms exposed to a mild dose of stress can become tolerant to what would otherwise be a lethal dose of subsequent stress; however, the mechanism of this acquired stress tolerance is poorly understood. To explore this, we exposed the yeast gene-deletion libraries, which interrogate all essential and non-essential genes, to successive stress treatments and identified genes necessary for acquiring subsequent stress resistance. Cells were exposed to one of three different mild stress pretreatments (salt, DTT, or heat shock) and then challenged with a severe dose of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). Surprisingly, there was little overlap in the genes required for acquisition of H2O2 tolerance after different mild-stress pretreatments, revealing distinct mechanisms of surviving H2O2 in each case. Integrative network analysis of these results with respect to protein–protein interactions, synthetic–genetic interactions, and functional annotations identified many processes not previously linked to H2O2 tolerance. We tested and present several models that explain the lack of overlap in genes required for H2O2 tolerance after each of the three pretreatments. Together, this work shows that acquired tolerance to the same severe stress occurs by different mechanisms depending on prior cellular experiences, underscoring the context-dependent nature of stress tolerance

    Scalable Diskless Checkpointing for Large Parallel Systems

    Get PDF
    Parallel scientific applications deal with machine unreliability by periodic checkpointing, in which all processes coordinate to dump memory to stable storage simultaneously. However, in systems comprising tens of thousands of nodes, the total data volume can overwhelm the network and storage farm, creating an I/O bottleneck. Furthermore, a very large class of scientific applications can fail on these systems if one of the processes dies. Poor checkpointing performance limits checkpointing frequency and increases the time-to-solution of applications. Also, the application can spend more time in recovery and restart because large systems tend to fail often. Diskless checkpointing is a viable approach that provides high-performance and reliable storage for \emph{intermediate or temporary} data, such as checkpoint files. First, the data is stored in memory instead of disk. Second, reliability and recoverability is guaranteed by use of redundancy codes (parity bits or Reed-Solomon codes), which are stored on spares. Third, I/O is made scalable by partitioning nodes and spares into small groups. Each group takes care of its own redundancy codes generation and node failure and recovery. We have implemented a diskless checkpointing and recovery system and assessed its performance with both I/O benchmarks and real scientific applications. The results show much greater I/O scalability and higher throughput than disk-based paralell file systems for a large number of clients. As a technology projection, we have also developed an analytical model to investigate the performability of diskless checkpointing. Our model evaluation shows that the overhead of checkpoint/recovery is small on systems with thousands of nodes, and with appropriate partitioning of nodes, the user application can survive several times longer
    corecore