Attenuation of the posttranslational oscillator via transcription-translation feedback enhances circadian-phase shifts in Synechococcus

The Function, Regulation, and Mechanism of Protein Turnover in Circadian Systems in Neurospora and Other Species

Circadian clocks drive a large array of physiological and behavioral activities. At the molecular level, circadian clocks are composed of positive and negative elements that form core oscillators generating the basic circadian rhythms. Over the course of the circadian period, circadian negative proteins undergo progressive hyperphosphorylation and eventually degrade, and their stability is finely controlled by complex post-translational pathways, including protein modifications, genetic codon preference, protein-protein interactions, chaperon-dependent conformation maintenance, degradation, etc. The effects of phosphorylation on the stability of circadian clock proteins are crucial for precisely determining protein function and turnover, and it has been proposed that the phosphorylation of core circadian clock proteins is tightly correlated with the circadian period. Nonetheless, recent studies have challenged this view. In this review, we summarize the research progress regarding the function, regulation, and mechanism of protein stability in the circadian clock systems of multiple model organisms, with an emphasis on Neurospora crassa, in which circadian mechanisms have been extensively investigated. Elucidation of the highly complex and dynamic regulation of protein stability in circadian clock networks would greatly benefit the integrated understanding of the function, regulation, and mechanism of protein stability in a wide spectrum of other biological processes.

Perfecting the Life Clock: The Journey from PTO to TTFL

The ubiquity of biological rhythms in life implies that it results from selection in the evolutionary process. The origin of the biological clock has two possible hypotheses: the selective pressure hypothesis of the oxidative stress cycle and the light evasion hypothesis. Moreover, the biological clock gives life higher adaptability. Two biological clock mechanisms have been discovered: the negative feedback loop of transcription-translation (TTFL) and the post-translational oscillation mechanism (PTO). The TTFL mechanism is the most classic and relatively conservative circadian clock oscillation mechanism, commonly found in eukaryotes. We have introduced the TTFL mechanism of the classical model organisms. However, the biological clock of prokaryotes is based on the PTO mechanism. The Peroxiredoxin (PRX or PRDX) protein-based PTO mechanism circadian clock widely existing in eukaryotic and prokaryotic life is considered a more conservative oscillation mechanism. The coexistence of the PTO and TTFL mechanisms in eukaryotes prompted us to explain the relationship between the two. Finally, we speculated that there might be a driving force for the evolution of the biological clock. The biological clock may have an evolutionary trend from the PTO mechanism to the TTFL mechanism, resulting from the evolution of organisms adapting to the environment.

Damped circadian oscillation in the absence of KaiA in Synechococcus

Proteins KaiA, KaiB and KaiC constitute a biochemical circadian oscillator in the cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus. It has been reported kaiA inactivation completely abolishes circadian oscillations. However, we show here that kaiBC promoter activity exhibits a damped, low-amplitude oscillation with a period of approximately 24 h in kaiA-inactivated strains. The damped rhythm resonates with external cycles with a period of 24–26 h, indicating that its natural frequency is similar to that of the circadian clock. Double-mutation experiments reveal that kaiC, kaiB, and sasA (encoding a KaiC-binding histidine kinase) are all required for the damped oscillation. Further analysis suggests that the kaiA-less damped transcriptional rhythm requires KaiB-KaiC complex formation and the transcription-translation feedback loop, but not the KaiC phosphorylation cycle. Our results provide insights into mechanisms that could potentially underlie the diurnal/circadian behaviors observed in other bacterial species that possess kaiB and kaiC homologues but lack a kaiA homologue.

Proteins KaiA, KaiB and KaiC constitute a biochemical circadian oscillator in Synechococcus cyanobacteria. Here, Kawamoto et al. show that kaiBC promoter activity exhibits a damped, low-amplitude circadian oscillation in the absence of KaiA, which could explain the circadian rhythms observed in other bacteria that lack a kaiA homologue.

The Kai-Protein Clock-Keeping Track of Cyanobacteria's Daily Life

Life has adapted to Earth's day-night cycle with the evolution of endogenous biological clocks. Whereas these circadian rhythms typically involve extensive transcription-translation feedback in higher organisms, cyanobacteria have a circadian clock, which functions primarily as a protein-based post-translational oscillator. Known as the Kai system, it consists of three proteins KaiA, KaiB, and KaiC. In this chapter, we provide a detailed structural overview of the Kai components and how they interact to produce circadian rhythms of global gene expression in cyanobacterial cells. We discuss how the circadian oscillation is coupled to gene expression, intertwined with transcription-translation feedback mechanisms, and entrained by input from the environment. We discuss the use of mathematical models and summarize insights into the cyanobacterial circadian clock from theoretical studies. The molecular details of the Kai system are well documented for the model cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus, but many less understood varieties of the Kai system exist across the highly diverse phylum of Cyanobacteria. Several species contain multiple kai-gene copies, while others like marine Prochlorococcus strains have a reduced kaiBC-only system, lacking kaiA. We highlight recent findings on the genomic distribution of kai genes in Bacteria and Archaea and finally discuss hypotheses on the evolution of the Kai system.

Structure, function, and mechanism of the core circadian clock in cyanobacteria

Circadian rhythms enable cells and organisms to coordinate their physiology with the cyclic environmental changes that come as a result of Earth's light/dark cycles. Cyanobacteria make use of a post-translational oscillator to maintain circadian rhythms, and this elegant system has become an important model for circadian timekeeping mechanisms. Composed of three proteins, the KaiABC system undergoes an oscillatory biochemical cycle that provides timing cues to achieve a 24-h molecular clock. Together with the input/output proteins SasA, CikA, and RpaA, these six gene products account for the timekeeping, entrainment, and output signaling functions in cyanobacterial circadian rhythms. This Minireview summarizes the current structural, functional and mechanistic insights into the cyanobacterial circadian clock.

Designing synthetic networks in silico: a generalised evolutionary algorithm approach

Background

Evolution has led to the development of biological networks that are shaped by environmental signals. Elucidating, understanding and then reconstructing important network motifs is one of the principal aims of Systems & Synthetic Biology. Consequently, previous research has focused on finding optimal network structures and reaction rates that respond to pulses or produce stable oscillations. In this work we present a generalised in silico evolutionary algorithm that simultaneously finds network structures and reaction rates (genotypes) that can satisfy multiple defined objectives (phenotypes).

Results

The key step to our approach is to translate a schema/binary-based description of biological networks into systems of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). The ODEs can then be solved numerically to provide dynamic information about an evolved networks functionality. Initially we benchmark algorithm performance by finding optimal networks that can recapitulate concentration time-series data and perform parameter optimisation on oscillatory dynamics of the Repressilator. We go on to show the utility of our algorithm by finding new designs for robust synthetic oscillators, and by performing multi-objective optimisation to find a set of oscillators and feed-forward loops that are optimal at balancing different system properties. In sum, our results not only confirm and build on previous observations but we also provide new designs of synthetic oscillators for experimental construction.

Conclusions

In this work we have presented and tested an evolutionary algorithm that can design a biological network to produce desired output. Given that previous designs of synthetic networks have been limited to subregions of network- and parameter-space, the use of our evolutionary optimisation algorithm will enable Synthetic Biologists to construct new systems with the potential to display a wider range of complex responses.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12918-017-0499-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

An Unstable Singularity Underlies Stochastic Phasing of the Circadian Clock in Individual Cyanobacterial Cells

The endogenous circadian clock synchronizes with environmental time by appropriately resetting its phase in response to external cues. Of note, some resetting stimuli induce attenuated oscillations of clock output, which has been observed at the population-level in several organisms and in studies of individual humans. To investigate what is happening in individual cellular clocks, we studied the unicellular cyanobacterium S. elongatus. By measuring its phase-resetting responses to temperature changes, we found that population-level arrhythmicity occurs when certain perturbations cause stochastic phases of oscillations in individual cells. Combining modeling with experiments, we related stochastic phasing to the dynamical structure of the cyanobacterial clock as an oscillator and explored the physiological relevance of the oscillator structure for accurately timed rhythmicity in changing environmental conditions. Our findings and approach can be applied to other biological oscillators.

Period Robustness and Entrainability of the Kai System to Changing Nucleotide Concentrations

Circadian clocks must be able to entrain to time-varying signals to keep their oscillations in phase with the day-night rhythm. On the other hand, they must also exhibit input compensation: their period must remain approximately one day in different constant environments. The posttranslational oscillator of the Kai system can be entrained by transient or oscillatory changes in the ATP fraction, yet is insensitive to constant changes in this fraction. We study in three different models of this system how these two seemingly conflicting criteria are met. We find that one of these (our recently published Paijmans model) exhibits the best tradeoff between input compensation and entrainability: on the footing of equal phase-response curves, it exhibits the strongest input compensation. Performing stochastic simulations at the level of individual hexamers allows us to identify a new, to our knowledge, mechanism, which is employed by the Paijmans model to achieve input compensation: at lower ATP fraction, the individual hexamers make a shorter cycle in the phosphorylation state space, which compensates for the slower pace at which they traverse the cycle.

Timing the day: what makes bacterial clocks tick?

Chronobiological studies of prokaryotic organisms have generally lagged far behind the study of endogenous circadian clocks in eukaryotes, in which such systems are essentially ubiquitous. However, despite only being studied during the past 25 years, cyanobacteria have become important model organisms for the study of circadian rhythms and, presently, their timekeeping mechanism is the best understood of any system in terms of biochemistry, structural biology, biophysics and adaptive importance. Nevertheless, intrinsic daily rhythmicity among bacteria other than cyanobacteria is essentially unknown; some tantalizing information suggests widespread daily timekeeping among Eubacteria and Archaea through mechanisms that share common elements with the cyanobacterial clock but are distinct. Moreover, the recent surge of information about microbiome-host interactions has largely neglected the temporal dimension and yet daily cycles control important aspects of their relationship.

Giving Time Purpose: The Synechococcus elongatus Clock in a Broader Network Context

Early research on the cyanobacterial clock focused on characterizing the genes needed to keep, entrain, and convey time within the cell. As the scope of assays used in molecular genetics has expanded to capture systems-level properties (e.g., RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, metabolomics, high-throughput screening of genetic variants), so has our understanding of how the clock fits within and influences a broader cellular context. Here we review the work that has established a global perspective of the clock, with a focus on (a) an emerging network-centric view of clock architecture, (b) mechanistic insights into how temporal and environmental cues are transmitted and integrated within this network,

Metabolic compensation and circadian resilience in prokaryotic cyanobacteria

For a biological oscillator to function as a circadian pacemaker that confers a fitness advantage, its timing functions must be stable in response to environmental and metabolic fluctuations. One such stability enhancer, temperature compensation, has long been a defining characteristic of these timekeepers. However, an accurate biological timekeeper must also resist changes in metabolism, and this review suggests that temperature compensation is actually a subset of a larger phenomenon, namely metabolic compensation, which maintains the frequency of circadian oscillators in response to a host of factors that impinge on metabolism and would otherwise destabilize these clocks. The circadian system of prokaryotic cyanobacteria is an illustrative model because it is composed of transcriptional and nontranscriptional oscillators that are coupled to promote resilience. Moreover, the cyanobacterial circadian program regulates gene activity and metabolic pathways, and it can be manipulated to improve the expression of bioproducts that have practical value.

Enhanced phase resetting in the synchronized suprachiasmatic nucleus network

The suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) adapts to both the external light-dark (LD) cycle and seasonal changes in day length. In short photoperiods, single-cell activity patterns are tightly synchronized (i.e., in phase); in long photoperiods, these patterns are relatively dispersed, causing lower amplitude rhythms. The limit cycle oscillator has been used to describe the SCN's circadian rhythmicity and predicts that following a given perturbation, high-amplitude SCN rhythms will shift less than low-amplitude rhythms. Some studies reported, however, that phase delays are larger when animals are entrained to a short photoperiod. Because phase advances and delays are mediated by partially distinct (i.e., nonoverlapping) biochemical pathways, we investigated the effect of a 4-h phase advance of the LD cycle in mice housed in either short (LD 8:16) or long (LD 16:8) photoperiods. In vitro recordings revealed a significantly larger phase advance in the SCN of mice entrained to short as compared to long photoperiods (4.2 ± 0.3 h v. 1.4 ± 0.9 h, respectively). Surprisingly, in mice with long photoperiods, the behavioral phase shift was larger than the phase shift of the SCN (3.7 ± 0.4 h v. 1.4 ± 0.9 h, respectively). To exclude a confounding influence of running-wheel activity on the magnitude of the shifts of the SCN, we repeated the experiments in the absence of running wheels and found similar shifts in the SCN in vitro in short and long days (3.0 ± 0.5 h v. 0.4 ± 0.9 h, respectively). Interestingly, removal of the running wheel reduced the phase-shifting capacity of mice in long days, leading to similar behavioral shifts in short and long photoperiods (1.0 ± 0.1 h v. 1.0 ± 0.4 h). As the behavioral shifts in the presence of wheels were larger than the shift of the SCN, it is suggested that additional, non-SCN neuronal networks in the brain are involved in regulating the timing of behavioral activity. On the basis of the phase shifts observed in vitro, we conclude that highly synchronized SCN networks with high-amplitude rhythms show a larger phase-shifting capacity than desynchronized networks of low amplitude.

Mixtures of opposing phosphorylations within hexamers precisely time feedback in the cyanobacterial circadian clock

Circadian oscillations are generated by the purified cyanobacterial clock proteins, KaiA, KaiB, and KaiC, through rhythmic interactions that depend on multisite phosphorylation of KaiC. However, the mechanisms that allow these phosphorylation reactions to robustly control the timing of oscillations over a range of protein stoichiometries are not clear. We show that when KaiC hexamers consist of a mixture of differentially phosphorylated subunits, the two phosphorylation sites have opposing effects on the ability of each hexamer to bind to the negative regulator KaiB. We likewise show that the ability of the positive regulator KaiA to act on KaiC depends on the phosphorylation state of the hexamer and that KaiA and KaiB recognize alternative allosteric states of the KaiC ring. Using mathematical models with kinetic parameters taken from experimental data, we find that antagonism of the two KaiC phosphorylation sites generates an ultrasensitive switch in negative feedback strength necessary for stable circadian oscillations over a range of component concentrations. Similar strategies based on opposing modifications may be used to support robustness in other timing systems and in cellular signaling more generally.

The cyanobacterial clock and metabolism

Cyanobacteria possess the simplest known circadian clock, which presents a unique opportunity to study how rhythms are generated and how input signals from the environment reset the clock time. The kaiABC locus forms the core of the oscillator, and the remarkable ability to reconstitute oscillations using purified KaiABC proteins has allowed researchers to study mechanism using the tools of quantitative biochemistry. Autotrophic cyanobacteria experience major shifts in metabolism following a light-dark transition, and recent work suggests that input mechanisms that couple the day-night cycle to the clock involve energy and redox metabolites acting directly on clock proteins. We offer a summary of the current state of knowledge in this system and present a perspective for future lines of investigation.

Hypersensitive photic responses and intact genome-wide transcriptional control without the KaiC phosphorylation cycle in the Synechococcus circadian system

Cyanobacteria are unique organisms with remarkably stable circadian oscillations. These are controlled by a network architecture that comprises two regulatory factors: posttranslational oscillation (PTO) and a transcription/translation feedback loop (TTFL). The clock proteins KaiA, KaiB, and KaiC are essential for the circadian rhythm of the unicellular species Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942. Temperature-compensated autonomous cycling of KaiC phosphorylation has been proposed as the primary oscillator mechanism that maintains the circadian clock, even in the dark, and it controls genome-wide gene expression rhythms under continuous-light conditions (LL). However, the kaiC(EE) mutation (where "EE" represents the amino acid changes Ser431Glu and Thr432Glu), where phosphorylation cycling does not occur in vivo, has a damped but clear kaiBC expression rhythm with a long period. This suggests that there must be coupling between the robust PTO and the "slave" unstable TTFL. Here, we found that the kaiC(EE) mutant strain in LL was hypersensitive to the dark acclimation required for phase shifting. Twenty-three percent of the genes in the kaiC(EE) mutant strain exhibited genome-wide transcriptional rhythms with a period of 48 h in LL. The circadian phase distribution was also conserved significantly in most of the wild-type and kaiC(EE) mutant strain cycling genes, which suggests that the output mechanism was not damaged severely even in the absence of KaiC phosphorylation cycles. These results strongly suggest that the KaiC phosphorylation cycle is not essential for generating the genome-wide rhythm under light conditions, whereas it is important for appropriate circadian timing in the light and dark.