Elsevier

Gene

Volume 485, Issue 2, 10 October 2011, Pages 91-101
Gene

Characterization of a CENP-B homolog in the holocentric Lepidoptera Spodoptera frugiperda

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gene.2011.06.007Get rights and content

Abstract

The discovery of an homolog of the human centromeric protein B, CENP-B, in an EST database of the holocentric insect species Spodoptera frugiperda prompted us to further characterize that gene because i) CENP-B has not been described in invertebrates yet ii) it should be a milestone in the molecular characterization of the holocentric centromere of Lepidoptera.

Like its human counterpart, the Sf CENP-B protein is related to the transposase of the pogo transposable element (TE) of D. melanogaster. In this paper, we show evidences that the lepidopteran cenpB gene has evolved from domestication of a transposase. Furthermore, the Sf CENP-B nuclear location and its ability to bind to a retrotransposon derived sequence in vivo argue in favor of a functional homology to CENP-B proteins.

Introduction

Holocentric chromosomes differ from the monocentric ones in centromere structure. In C. elegans, during mitosis, kinetochore spans most of the chromosome length (Albertson and Thomson, 1982). At meiosis, conventional electronic microscopy failed to show a trilaminar kinetochore structure (Albertson and Thomson, 1993, Wicky and Rose, 1996). However confocal microscopy allowed visualization of kinetochore proteins (KNL-1, HIM-10) forming a cup-like structure that encloses the ends of the chromosomes (Howe et al., 2001, Monen et al., 2005). Although reverse genetics via RNA interference in C. elegans led to the discovery of more than 30 kinetochore proteins among which, HCP-3 and HCP-1, homolog to the human centromeric chromatin binding proteins CENP-A and CENP-C (see (Maddox et al., 2004) for review), DNA sequences interacting with them have not been identified yet (Buchwitz et al., 1999, Desai et al., 2003, Moore and Roth, 2001, Oegema et al., 2001).

The chromosomes of several insect orders separated by at least 300 million years have been described as holocentric (Hughes-Schrader and Rise, 1941, Schrader, 1947, Suomalainen, 1953). Some chromosomal fragments obtained after irradiation (inducing chromosome breakage) can be maintained over several generations (Fujiwara et al., 1991, Hughes-Schrader and Rise, 1941, Murakami and Imai, 1974). Several authors have described holocentric chromosomes in meiotic cells on testis or ovarioles of Vth instar insect larvae (see review by (White, 1973)). The existence of kinetochore plaques extending over 50% to 70% of the chromosome pole ward surface of the chromosome was confirmed by electronic microscopy (Wolf, 1994). New insights on holocentric chromosome structure and segregation should come from the study of lepidopteran species, with the recent availability of the B. mori genome (Mita et al., 2004, Xia et al., 2008; The International Silkworm genome Consortium, 2008) which seems to be somehow differently organized than the genome of the holocentric model C. elegans (45% of repeated sequences in B. mori (Berry, 1985) compared to 17% in C. elegans (Sulston and Brenner, 1974)).

The discovery of an homolog of CENP-B in an EST database of the holocentric insect species Spodoptera frugiperda prompted us to further characterize that gene because i) CENP-B has not been described yet in invertebrates and ii) it could be a milestone in characterization of the holocentric centromere of Lepidoptera.

CENP-B is a centromere associated protein originally identified in human cells as a 65 kDa autoantigen (apparent molecular weight of 80 kDa) recognized by sera from patients with anti-centromere antibodies (ACA) (Earnshaw and Rothfield, 1985). CENP-B interacts with centromeric heterochromatin in human chromosomes (Earnshaw et al., 1987) and binds specifically to a 17 bp sequence embedded in the alphoid repeats, the CENP-B box (Masumoto et al., 1989, Yoda et al., 1992). CENP-B is thought to form a higher-order chromatin structure required for kinetochore formation by virtue of its ability to dimerize (Masumoto et al., 1989, Muro et al., 1992, Yoda et al., 1992). Supporting this idea, CENP-B box is required for de novo centromere assembly on human alphoid DNA (Ohzeki et al., 2002). CENP-B homologs have been described in mammals (Sullivan and Glass, 1991, Yoda et al., 1996), fission yeast (Halverson et al., 1997) and plants (Barbosa-Cisneros and Herrera-Esparza, 2002), however its biological role has remained elusive in some species because of functional redundancy or maybe because of a dual role of this protein. CENP-B protein is able to target alphoid DNA by the N-terminal DNA-binding domain and to initiate nucleation of CENP-A chromatin on naked DNA in mammalian cell lines. By its C-terminal domain, it may be able to interact directly or indirectly with chromatin modifying enzymes like histone methyl tranferases and to enhance heterochromatin formation (Okada et al., 2007).

Here we describe the Sf cenpB gene structure, its syntenic genomic environment in related lepidopteran species, putative properties of the encoded polypeptide, its cellular expression and localization, its in vivo DNA targets, the first attempts to assess its biological function and we discuss the possibility that, like fission yeast and human CENP-B homologs, it may result from convergent domestication of a type II transposase (Casola et al., 2008).

Section snippets

Isolation of the Sf cenpB gene and sequence analysis

An EST database from Sf9 cells (Landais et al., 2001) was searched for homology with the human CENP-B protein sequence (accession number P07199) using TBLASTN (Altschul et al., 1997). One EST, Sf9L08080 matches to the query (30% identities over 121 amino acids, E Value 1e-06). Sequencing of the 1.7 kb insert carried by the Sf9L08080 cDNA clone was completed using primers p120 = CAAAACCTTCTTGATTGGTTTGAA, p123 = CTTGGTACAACAGAACTAAGC. To obtain the corresponding genomic sequence, high density filters

Gene structure and evolution

In an attempt to elucidate the Spodoptera holocentric centromere, we screened the available EST library of Sf9 cells (Landais et al., 2001, Negre et al., 2006) for homology to known centromeric proteins sequences. Whereas no candidate sequences could be found for CENP-A or CENP-C homolog, the discovery of 2 EST matching to the human CENP-B protein sequence prompted us to further characterize that gene. The 2 cDNA clones (Sf9L08080 and Sf9L02653) were sequenced to completion, they carry an

Discussion

Since the Sf CENP-B homolog found in our Sf9 cDNA library shares nearly equal amount of similarity/identity with the Hs CENP-B and the gene encoding transposase of the D. melanogaster pogo element (Tudor et al., 1992), we carried out a study aiming at discriminating between these 2 putative functions.

At first, we found that the Sf CENP-B gene is devoid of intron and is a mono-copy gene like Hs CENP-B gene contrary to the gene for pogo transposase which contains an intron and is a multicopy-gene

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique and Agence Nationale de la Recherche Grant 07-BLAN-0057-01.

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