In the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, the transcriptional-regulatory network that governs flocculation remains poorly understood. Here, we systematically screened an array of transcription factor deletion and overexpression strains for flocculation and performed microarray expression profiling and ChIP-chip analysis to identify the flocculin target genes. We identified five transcription factors that displayed novel roles in the activation or inhibition of flocculation (Rfl1, Adn2, Adn3, Sre2, and Yox1), in addition to the previously-known Mbx2, Cbf11, and Cbf12 regulators. Overexpression of mbx2(+) and deletion of rfl1(+) resulted in strong flocculation and transcriptional upregulation of gsf2(+)/pfl1(+) and several other putative flocculin genes (pfl2(+)-pfl9(+)). Overexpression of the pfl(+) genes singly was sufficient to trigger flocculation, and enhanced flocculation was observed in several combinations of double pfl(+) overexpression. Among the pfl1(+) genes, only loss of gsf2(+) abrogated the flocculent phenotype of all the transcription factor mutants and prevented flocculation when cells were grown in inducing medium containing glycerol and ethanol as the carbon source, thereby indicating that Gsf2 is the dominant flocculin. In contrast, the mild flocculation of adn2(+) or adn3(+) overexpression was likely mediated by the transcriptional activation of cell wall-remodeling genes including gas2(+), psu1(+), and SPAC4H3.03c. We also discovered that Mbx2 and Cbf12 displayed transcriptional autoregulation, and Rfl1 repressed gsf2(+) expression in an inhibitory feed-forward loop involving mbx2(+). These results reveal that flocculation in S. pombe is regulated by a complex network of multiple transcription factors and target genes encoding flocculins and cell wall-remodeling enzymes. Moreover, comparisons between the flocculation transcriptional-regulatory networks of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and S. pombe indicate substantial rewiring of transcription factors and cis-regulatory sequences.
Pubmed ID: 23236291 RIS Download
Publication data is provided by the National Library of Medicine ® and PubMed ®. Data is retrieved from PubMed ® on a weekly schedule. For terms and conditions see the National Library of Medicine Terms and Conditions.
Model organism database that provides organization of and access to scientific data for the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe. PomBase supports genomic sequence and features, genome-wide datasets and manual literature curation. PomBase also provides a community hub for researchers, providing genome statistics, a community curation interface, news, events, documentation, mailing lists, and welcomes data submissions.
View all literature mentionsThe Generic GO Term Finder finds the significant GO terms shared among a list of genes from an organism, displaying the results in a table and as a graph (showing the terms and their ancestry). The user may optionally provide background information or a custom gene association file or filter evidence codes. This tool is capable of batch processing multiple queries at once. GO::TermFinder comprises a set of object-oriented Perl modules GO::TermFinder can be used on any system on which Perl can be run, either as a command line application, in single or batch mode, or as a web-based CGI script. This implementation, developed at the Lewis-Sigler Institute at Princeton, depends on the GO-TermFinder software written by Gavin Sherlock and Shuai Weng at Stanford University and the GO:View module written by Shuai Weng. It is made publicly available through the GMOD project. The full source code and documentation for GO:TermFinder are freely available from http://search.cpan.org/dist/GO-TermFinder/. Platform: Online tool, Windows compatible, Mac OS X compatible, Linux compatible, Unix compatible
View all literature mentionsSoftware package for the analysis of gene expression microarray data, especially the use of linear models for analyzing designed experiments and the assessment of differential expression.
View all literature mentionsSoftware R package. Methods for Cluster analysis. Performs variety of types of cluster analysis and other types of processing on large microarray datasets.
View all literature mentions