Nucleosome-coupled expression differences in closely-related species

Population perspectives on functional genomic variation in yeast

Advances in high-throughput sequencing have facilitated large-scale surveys of genomic variation in the budding yeast,Saccharomyces cerevisiae These surveys have revealed extensive sequence variation between yeast strains. However, much less is known about how such variation influences the amount and nature of variation for functional genomic traits within and between yeast lineages. We review population-level studies of functional genomic variation, with a particular focus on how population functional genomic approaches can provide insights into both genome function and the evolutionary process. Although variation in functional genomics phenotypes is pervasive, our understanding of the consequences of this variation, either in physiological or evolutionary terms, is still rudimentary and thus motivates increased attention to appropriate null models. To date, much of the focus of population functional genomic studies has been on gene expression variation, but other functional genomic data types are just as likely to reveal important insights at the population level, suggesting a pressing need for more studies that go beyond transcription. Finally, we discuss how a population functional genomic perspective can be a powerful approach for developing a mechanistic understanding of the processes that link genomic variation to organismal phenotypes through gene networks.

A new system for comparative functional genomics of Saccharomyces yeasts

Whole-genome sequencing, particularly in fungi, has progressed at a tremendous rate. More difficult, however, is experimental testing of the inferences about gene function that can be drawn from comparative sequence analysis alone. We present a genome-wide functional characterization of a sequenced but experimentally understudied budding yeast, Saccharomyces bayanus var. uvarum (henceforth referred to as S. bayanus), allowing us to map changes over the 20 million years that separate this organism from S. cerevisiae. We first created a suite of genetic tools to facilitate work in S. bayanus. Next, we measured the gene-expression response of S. bayanus to a diverse set of perturbations optimized using a computational approach to cover a diverse array of functionally relevant biological responses. The resulting data set reveals that gene-expression patterns are largely conserved, but significant changes may exist in regulatory networks such as carbohydrate utilization and meiosis. In addition to regulatory changes, our approach identified gene functions that have diverged. The functions of genes in core pathways are highly conserved, but we observed many changes in which genes are involved in osmotic stress, peroxisome biogenesis, and autophagy. A surprising number of genes specific to S. bayanus respond to oxidative stress, suggesting the organism may have evolved under different selection pressures than S. cerevisiae. This work expands the scope of genome-scale evolutionary studies from sequence-based analysis to rapid experimental characterization and could be adopted for functional mapping in any lineage of interest. Furthermore, our detailed characterization of S. bayanus provides a valuable resource for comparative functional genomics studies in yeast.

Archaeal nucleosome positioning in vivo and in vitro is directed by primary sequence motifs

Background

Histone wrapping of DNA into nucleosomes almost certainly evolved in the Archaea, and predates Eukaryotes. In Eukaryotes, nucleosome positioning plays a central role in regulating gene expression and is directed by primary sequence motifs that together form a nucleosome positioning code. The experiments reported were undertaken to determine if archaeal histone assembly conforms to the nucleosome positioning code.

Results

Eukaryotic nucleosome positioning is favored and directed by phased helical repeats of AA/TT/AT/TA and CC/GG/CG/GC dinucleotides, and disfavored by longer AT-rich oligonucleotides. Deep sequencing of genomic DNA protected from micrococcal nuclease digestion by assembly into archaeal nucleosomes has established that archaeal nucleosome assembly is also directed and positioned by these sequence motifs, both in vivo in Methanothermobacter thermautotrophicus and Thermococcus kodakarensis and in vitro in reaction mixtures containing only one purified archaeal histone and genomic DNA. Archaeal nucleosomes assembled at the same locations in vivo and in vitro, with much reduced assembly immediately upstream of open reading frames and throughout the ribosomal rDNA operons. Providing further support for a common positioning code, archaeal histones assembled into nucleosomes on eukaryotic DNA and eukaryotic histones into nucleosomes on archaeal DNA at the same locations. T. kodakarensis has two histones, designated HTkA and HTkB, and strains with either but not both histones deleted grow normally but do exhibit transcriptome differences. Comparisons of the archaeal nucleosome profiles in the intergenic regions immediately upstream of genes that exhibited increased or decreased transcription in the absence of HTkA or HTkB revealed substantial differences but no consistent pattern of changes that would correlate directly with archaeal nucleosome positioning inhibiting or stimulating transcription.

Conclusions

The results obtained establish that an archaeal histone and a genome sequence together are sufficient to determine where archaeal nucleosomes preferentially assemble and where they avoid assembly. We confirm that the same nucleosome positioning code operates in Archaea as in Eukaryotes and presumably therefore evolved with the histone-fold mechanism of DNA binding and compaction early in the archaeal lineage, before the divergence of Eukaryotes.

Comparative gene expression between two yeast species

Background

Comparative genomics brings insight into sequence evolution, but even more may be learned by coupling sequence analyses with experimental tests of gene function and regulation. However, the reliability of such comparisons is often limited by biased sampling of expression conditions and incomplete knowledge of gene functions across species. To address these challenges, we previously systematically generated expression profiles in Saccharomyces bayanus to maximize functional coverage as compared to an existing Saccharomyces cerevisiae data repository.

Results

In this paper, we take advantage of these two data repositories to compare patterns of ortholog expression in a wide variety of conditions. First, we developed a scalable metric for expression divergence that enabled us to detect a significant correlation between sequence and expression conservation on the global level, which previous smaller-scale expression studies failed to detect. Despite this global conservation trend, between-species gene expression neighborhoods were less well-conserved than within-species comparisons across different environmental perturbations, and approximately 4% of orthologs exhibited a significant change in co-expression partners. Furthermore, our analysis of matched perturbations collected in both species (such as diauxic shift and cell cycle synchrony) demonstrated that approximately a quarter of orthologs exhibit condition-specific expression pattern differences.

Conclusions

Taken together, these analyses provide a global view of gene expression patterns between two species, both in terms of the conditions and timing of a gene's expression as well as co-expression partners. Our results provide testable hypotheses that will direct future experiments to determine how these changes may be specified in the genome.

Nucleosome positioning: bringing order to the eukaryotic genome

Nucleosomes are an essential component of eukaryotic chromosomes. The impact of nucleosomes is seen not just on processes that directly access the genome, such as transcription, but also on an evolutionary timescale. Recent studies in various organisms have provided high-resolution maps of nucleosomes throughout the genome. Computational analysis, in conjunction with many other kinds of data, has shed light on several aspects of nucleosome biology. Nucleosomes are positioned by several means, including intrinsic sequence biases, by stacking against a fixed barrier, by DNA-binding proteins and by chromatin remodelers. These studies underscore the important organizational role of nucleosomes in all eukaryotic genomes. This paper reviews recent genomic studies that have shed light on the determinants of nucleosome positioning and their impact on the genome.