Abstracts Biological Sciences

Functional and interacting domains of the yeast and human Mre11

by Mahmood Chamankhah

In an effort to understand the molecular mechanisms of DNA alkylation repair, I initiated molecular cloning of a novel gene, ' NGS1'. The Saccharomyces cerevisiae ngs1-1 mutant was previously identified by its enhanced sensitivity to simple DNA alkylating agents such as methyl methanesulfonate but not to UV. Molecular cloning and sequencing of 'NGS1' as a putative DNA alkylation repair gene revealed that it is identical to 'MRE11'/'RAD58', a gene that is involved in meiotic recombination and DNA recombinational repair. In order to investigate functional domains of the Mre11 protein, I determined the nucleotide sequence alterations of a number of 'mre11' mutant alleles, including 'ngs1-1', 'mre11-1' ('ts'), 'mre11-2', 'mre11-3' and 'mre11-58'. The location of various 'ngs1'/' mre11'/'rad58' mutations combined with the deletion analysis indicates that the functional domain(s) resides in the highly conserved N-terminus of Mre11. I also investigated various roles of Mre11 in spontaneous and DNA damage-inducedmitotic recombination. The assays used in this study show that the mre11D mutation enhances inter-chromosomal recombination but decreases the intra-chromosomal deletion frequency. In addition, 'MRE11' appears to play different roles during spontaneous and alkylation-induced homologous mitotic recombination. Physical interactions between members of the 'RAD52' epistasis group have been detected genetically and biochemically. These protein interactions also appear to be important at the early stage of meiotic recombination. Mre11 has been shown to interact with itself, Rad50 and Xrs2 in a yeast two-hybrid system. Preliminary studies employing deletion analysis predicted that the self-interaction domain of Mre11 resided at the N-terminus of the protein. To determine domain(s) required for Mre11 complex formation, and to elucidate the relationship between this complex formation and 'MRE11' DNA repair function, I employed a combined yeast two-hybrid and functional analyses. My results indicate that both Mre11 dimerization and interaction with Rad50 are essential for recombinational repair. I found that the N-terminus of the Mre11 protein constitutes the core homodimerization and heterodimerization domain and is sufficient for Mre11 DNA repair activity. Collectively, these studies support the hypothesis that Mre11 self-association as well as its assembly into a multi-protein complex consisting of Mre11 and Rad50 are essential for effective DNA recombinational repair. Using the sequence of yeast 'MRE11', isolated the full-length ' hMRE11B' cDNA from a human HeLa cell cDNA library. Compared to the previously identified 'hMRE11', 'hMRE11B' contains an additional 84 base pair sequence that results in a 28 amino acid insertion close to the C-terminus. Overexpression of 'hMRE11B' does not complement the alkylation sensitivity of the 'mre11' null and temperature sensitive mutant strains. My results suggest that species-specific protein interaction determines the functional specificity of 'MRE11 ' and that the participation of…