Lipids hit a “sweet spot” to direct cellular membrane remodeling.

Lipid membrane reshaping is critical to many common cellular processes, including cargo trafficking, cell motility, and organelle biogenesis. The Rodal lab studies how dynamic membrane remodeling is achieved by the active interplay between lipids and proteins. Recent results, published in Cell Reports, demonstrate that for the membrane remodeling protein Nervous Wreck (Nwk), intramolecular autoregulation and membrane charge work together in surprising ways to restrict remodeling to a limited range of lipid compositions.

F-BAR (Fes/Cip4 homology Bin/Amphiphysin/Rvs) domain family proteins are important mediators of membrane remodeling events. The F-BAR domain forms a crescent-shaped α-helical dimer that interacts with and deforms negatively charged membrane phospholipids by assembling into higher-order scaffolds. In this paper, Kelley et al. have shown that the neuronal F-BAR protein Nwk is autoregulated by its C-terminal SH3 domains, which interact directly with the F-BAR domain to inhibit membrane binding. Until now, the dogma in the field has been that increasing concentrations of negatively charged lipids would increase Nwk membrane binding, and thus would induce membrane deformation.

Surprisingly, Kelley et al. found that autoregulation does not mediate this kind of simple “on-off” switch for membrane remodeling. Instead, increasing the concentration of negatively charged lipids increases membrane binding, but inhibits F-BAR membrane deforming activities (see below). Using a combination of in vitro assays and single particle electron microscopy, they found that the Nwk F-BAR domain efficiently assembles into higher-order structures and deforms membranes only within “sweet spot” of negative membrane charge, and that autoregulation elevates this range. The implication of this work is that autoregulation could either reduce membrane binding or promote higher-order assembly, depending on local cellular membrane composition. This study suggests a significant role for the regulation of membrane composition in remodeling.

Brandeis authors on the study included Molecular and Cell Biology graduate students Charlotte Kelley and Shiyu Wang, staff member Tania Eskin, and undergraduate Emily Messelaar ’13 from the Rodal lab; postdoctoral fellow Kangkang Song, Associate Professor of Biology Daniela Nicastro (currently at UT Southwestern), and Associate Professor of Physics Michael Hagan.

Kelley CF, Messelaar EM, Eskin TL, Wang S, Song K, Vishnia K, Becalska AN, Shupliakov O, Hagan MF, Danino D, Sokolova OS, Nicastro D, Rodal AA. Membrane Charge Directs the Outcome of F-BAR Domain Lipid Binding and Autoregulation. Cell reports. 2015;13(11):2597-609.

Patching Up Broken Chromosomes

Olga Tsaponina and James Haber’s recent paper “Frequent Interchromosomal Template Switches during Gene Conversion in S. cerevisiae” was published online by Molecular Cell on July 24, 2014.

by James Haber

“The process of copying DNA every time our cells divide is exceptionally accurate, but in copying 6,000,000,000 base pairs of the genome mistakes do occur, including both mutations and the formation of chromosome breaks. These breaks must be repaired to maintain the integrity of our chromosomes.  In our recent paper we have demonstrated that the mechanism of patching up a broken chromosome is associated with a surprisingly high level of alterations of the sequence.  Many of these changes result from “slippage” of the DNA polymerases copying the DNA during the repair process; for example in copying a sequence of 4 Gs, the polymerase occasionally jumps over one, to lose a base from the sequence (a frameshift mutation).

In this paper we focused on more dramatic slippage events in which the copying machinery jumped from one chromosome to a related but divergent sequence on another chromosome and then jumped back, creating a chimeric sequence.  These interchromosomal template switches (ICTS) occur at a low rate when the distant sequence is only 71% identical, but if we make that segment 100% identical we could find such jumps 10,000 times more frequently, in about 1 in 300 events.  This result reveals how unstable the copying machinery in DNA repair is compared to normal DNA replication. This was very surprising and provides an explanation for many complex rearrangements associated with cancers.  In carrying out this work we identified the first protein that is needed to permit these frequent jumps: a chromatin remodeling enzyme known as Rdh54 that previously did not have a well-defined role in DNA repair in somatic cells.

Finally, we learned a new role for the proteins that survey the genome for mismatched bases that arise during replication and found that one of these proteins, Msh6, is required to specify which strand of DNA containing a mismatch is the “good one” that should be used as the template to correct the mismatch.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health General Medical Institute”.