Using Yeast Transposon-Insertion Libraries for Phenotypic Screening and Protein Localization

Jump around: transposons in and out of the laboratory

Since Barbara McClintock’s groundbreaking discovery of mobile DNA sequences some 70 years ago, transposable elements have come to be recognized as important mutagenic agents impacting genome composition, genome evolution, and human health. Transposable elements are a major constituent of prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes, and the transposition mechanisms enabling transposon proliferation over evolutionary time remain engaging topics for study, suggesting complex interactions with the host, both antagonistic and mutualistic. The impact of transposition is profound, as over 100 human heritable diseases have been attributed to transposon insertions. Transposition can be highly mutagenic, perturbing genome integrity and gene expression in a wide range of organisms. This mutagenic potential has been exploited in the laboratory, where transposons have long been utilized for phenotypic screening and the generation of defined mutant libraries. More recently, barcoding applications and methods for RNA-directed transposition are being used towards new phenotypic screens and studies relevant for gene therapy. Thus, transposable elements are significant in affecting biology both in vivo and in the laboratory, and this review will survey advances in understanding the biological role of transposons and relevant laboratory applications of these powerful molecular tools.

Multimodal Microorganism Development: Integrating Top-Down Biological Engineering with Bottom-Up Rational Design

Biological engineering has unprecedented potential to solve society's most pressing challenges. Engineering approaches must consider complex technical, economic, and social factors. This requires methods that confer gene/pathway-level functionality and organism-level robustness in rapid and cost-effective ways. This article compares foundational engineering approaches - bottom-up, gene-targeted engineering, and top-down, whole-genome engineering - and identifies significant complementarity between them. Cases drawn from engineering Saccharomyces cerevisiae exemplify the synergy of a combined approach. Indeed, multimodal engineering streamlines strain development by leveraging the complementarity of whole-genome and gene-targeted engineering to overcome the gap in design knowledge that restricts rational design. As biological engineers target more complex systems, this dual-track approach is poised to become an increasingly important tool to realize the promise of synthetic biology.

Yeast as a tool to identify anti-aging compounds

In the search for interventions against aging and age-related diseases, biological screening platforms are indispensable tools to identify anti-aging compounds among large substance libraries. The budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, has emerged as a powerful chemical and genetic screening platform, as it combines a rapid workflow with experimental amenability and the availability of a wide range of genetic mutant libraries. Given the amount of conserved genes and aging mechanisms between yeast and human, testing candidate anti-aging substances in yeast gene-deletion or overexpression collections, or de novo derived mutants, has proven highly successful in finding potential molecular targets. Yeast-based studies, for example, have led to the discovery of the polyphenol resveratrol and the natural polyamine spermidine as potential anti-aging agents. Here, we present strategies for pharmacological anti-aging screens in yeast, discuss common pitfalls and summarize studies that have used yeast for drug discovery and target identification.

Multipurpose Transposon-Insertion Libraries in Yeast

Libraries of transposon-insertion alleles constitute powerful and versatile tools for large-scale analysis of yeast gene function. Transposon-insertion libraries are constructed most simply through mutagenesis of a plasmid-based genomic DNA library; modification of the mutagenizing transposon by incorporation of yeast selectable markers, recombination sites, and an epitope tag enables the application of insertion alleles for phenotypic screening and protein localization. In particular, yeast genomic DNA libraries have been mutagenized with modified bacterial transposons carrying the URA3 marker, lox recombination sites, and sequence encoding multiple copies of the hemagglutinin (HA) epitope. Mutagenesis with these transposons has yielded a large resource of insertion alleles affecting nearly 4000 yeast genes in total. Through well-established protocols, these insertion libraries can be introduced into the desired strain backgrounds and the resulting insertional mutants can be screened or systematically analyzed. Relative to alternative methods of UV irradiation or chemical mutagenesis, transposon-insertion alleles can be easily identified by PCR-based approaches or high-throughput sequencing. Transposon-insertion libraries also provide a cost-effective alternative to targeted deletion approaches, although, in contrast to start-codon to stop-codon deletions, insertion alleles might not represent true null-mutants. For protein-localization studies, transposon-insertion alleles can provide encoded epitope tags in-frame with internal codons; in many cases, these transposon-encoded epitope tags can provide a more accurate localization for proteins in which terminal sequences are crucial for intracellular targeting. Thus, overall, transposon-insertion libraries can be used quickly and economically and have a particular utility in screening for desired phenotypes and localization patterns in nonstandard genetic backgrounds.