Oxidative phosphorylation is an indispensable resource of ATP in tissues with high requirement of energy. If the ATP demand is not met, studies suggest that this will lead to senescence and cell death in the affected tissue. The term reserve respiratory capacity or spare respiratory capacity is used to describe the amount of extra ATP that can be produced by oxidative phosphorylation in case of a sudden increase in energy demand. Depletion of the reserve respiratory capacity has been related to a range of pathologies affecting high energy requiring tissues. During aging of an organism, and as a result of mitochondrial dysfunctions, the efficiency of oxidative phosphorylation declines. Based on examples from the energy requiring tissues such as brain, heart, and skeletal muscle, we propose that the age-related decline of oxidative phosphorylation decreases the reserve respiratory capacity of the affected tissue, sensitizes the cells to surges in ATP demand, and increases the risk of resulting pathologies.
Summary Alzheimer disease (AD) is a devastating neurological disease associated with progressive loss of mental skills and cognitive and physical functions whose etiology is not completely understood. Here, our goal was to simultaneously uncover novel and known molecular targets in the structured layers of the hippocampus and olfactory bulbs that may contribute to early hippocampal synaptic deficits and olfactory dysfunction in AD mice. Spatially resolved transcriptomics was used to identify high-confidence genes that were differentially regulated in AD mice relative to controls. A diverse set of genes that modulate stress responses and transcription were predominant in both hippocampi and olfactory bulbs. Notably, we identify Bok, implicated in mitochondrial physiology and cell death, as a spatially downregulated gene in the hippocampus of mouse and human AD brains. In summary, we provide a rich resource of spatially differentially expressed genes, which may contribute to understanding AD pathology.
In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, absence of the checkpoint kinase Mec1 (ATR) is viable upon mutations that increase the activity of the ribonucleotide reductase (RNR) complex. Whether this pathway is conserved in mammals remains unknown. Here we show that cells from mice carrying extra alleles of the RNR regulatory subunit RRM2 (Rrm2 TG ) present supraphysiological RNR activity and reduced chromosomal breakage at fragile sites. Moreover, increased Rrm2 gene dosage significantly extends the life span of ATR mutant mice. Our study reveals the first genetic condition in mammals that reduces fragile site expression and alleviates the severity of a progeroid disease by increasing RNR activity.Supplemental material is available for this article.Received December 5, 2014; revised version accepted March 2, 2015.Replication stress (RS) has emerged as a source of genome instability in human diseases, including cancer and premature aging (Lecona and Fernandez-Capetillo 2014;Zeman and Cimprich 2014). In brief, RS is defined by the accumulation of abnormal amounts of ssDNA at stalled replication forks that, due to its recombinogenic nature, can initiate genomic rearrangements. In mammals, RS is sensed and suppressed by a signaling cascade initiated by the ATR kinase, which, together with its target kinase, CHK1, suppresses RS through the phosphorylation of multiple targets (Cimprich and Cortez 2008;Lopez-Contreras and Fernandez-Capetillo 2010). ATR and CHK1 are essential for embryonic development in mice (Brown and Baltimore 2000;de Klein et al. 2000;Liu et al. 2000), which is due to the role of the RS response (RSR) in preventing replication-born chromosome breakage. Whether the RSR protects all forks or a subset of them during replication is unclear. On the one hand, proteomic studies of the human replisome in unchallenged conditions have failed to detect ATR or CHK1 in the vicinity of replication forks Sirbu et al. 2013), suggesting that their activity might be particularly necessary for only a subset of forks, such as damaged ones. Accordingly, chromosomal breaks that arise upon ATR inactivation locate preferentially at specific loci named common fragile sites (CFSs) (Casper et al. 2002) and early replicating fragile sites (ERFSs) (Barlow et al. 2013). Regardless of whether ATR works at all forks or only some of them, how it suppresses RS and why it is essential are still not fully understood.Ribonucleotide reductase (RNR) is a tetrameric enzyme composed of two catalytic (RRM1, Rnr1 in yeast) and two regulatory (RRM2, Rnr2 in yeast) subunits (Jordan and Reichard 1998). It reduces NDPs into dNDPs, which is a rate-limiting step for the production of dNTPs. In yeast, the lethality of mec1Δ strains can be bypassed by mutations that increase RNR activity. The first evidence of a connection between ATR and RNR came from the discovery of Crt1 (a transcriptional repressor of RNR subunits) as a suppressor of Mec1 lethality in Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Huang et al. 1998). Furthermore, overproduction of Rnr1 was shown to be sufficient ...
Several enzymes of the metabolic pathways responsible for metabolism of cytosolic ribonucleotides and deoxyribonucleotides are located in mitochondria. Studies described in this paper suggest dysfunction of the mitochondria to affect these metabolic pathways and limit the available levels of cytosolic ribonucleotides and deoxyribonucleotides, which in turn can result in aberrant RNA and DNA synthesis. Mitochondrial dysfunction has been linked to genomic instability, and it is possible that the limiting effect of mitochondrial dysfunction on the levels of nucleotides and resulting aberrant RNA and DNA synthesis in part can be responsible for this link. This paper summarizes the parts of the metabolic pathways responsible for nucleotide metabolism that can be affected by mitochondrial dysfunction.
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