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The following full text is a publisher's version.For additional information about this publication click this link. https://hdl.handle.net/2066/229509Please be advised that this information was generated on 2023-04-03 and may be subject to change.T h e ne w e ngl a nd jou r na l o f m e dicine n engl j med 383;24 nejm.org

Fanconi anemia (FA) is a complex cancer susceptibility disorder associated with DNA repair defects and infertility, yet the precise function of the FA proteins in genome maintenance remains unclear. Here we report that C. elegans FANCD2 (fcd-2) is dispensable for normal meiotic recombination but is required in crossover defective mutants to prevent illegitimate repair of meiotic breaks by nonhomologous end joining (NHEJ). In mitotic cells, we show that DNA repair defects of C. elegans fcd-2 mutants and FA-deficient human cells are significantly suppressed by eliminating NHEJ. Moreover, NHEJ factors are inappropriately recruited to sites of replication stress in the absence of FANCD2. Our findings are consistent with the interpretation that FA results from the promiscuous action of NHEJ during DNA repair. We propose that a critical function of the FA pathway is to channel lesions into accurate, as opposed to error-prone, repair pathways.

TEL2 interacts with and is essential for the stability of all phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase-related kinases (PIKKs), but its mechanism of action remains unclear. Here, we show that TEL2 is constitutively phosphorylated on conserved serines 487 and 491 by casein kinase 2 (CK2). Proteomic analyses establish that the CK2 phosphosite of TEL2 confers binding to the R2TP/prefoldin-like complex, which possesses chaperon/prefoldin activities required during protein complex assembly. The PIH1D1 subunit of the R2TP complex binds directly to the CK2 phosphosite of TEL2 in vitro and is required for the TEL2-R2TP/prefoldin-like complex interaction in vivo. Although the CK2 phosphosite mutant of TEL2 retains association with the PIKKs and HSP90 in cells, failure to interact with the R2TP/prefoldin-like complex results in instability of the PIKKs, principally mTOR and SMG1. We propose that TEL2 acts as a scaffold to coordinate the activities of R2TP/prefoldin-like and HSP90 chaperone complexes during the assembly of the PIKKs.

Repair of interstrand crosslinks (ICLs) requires the coordinate action of the intra-S phase checkpoint and the Fanconi Anemia (FA) pathway, which promote ICL incision, translesion synthesis, and homologous recombination (reviewed in 1,2). Previous studies have implicated the 3′-5′ superfamily 2 helicase HELQ/Hel308 in ICL repair in D. melanogaster (known as Mus301 or Spn-C3) and C. elegans (known as Helq-1 or Hel-3084). While in vitro analysis suggests that HELQ preferentially unwinds synthetic replication fork substrates with 3′ ssDNA overhangs and also disrupts protein/DNA interactions while translocating along DNA5,6, little is known regarding its functions in mammalian organisms. Here we report that HELQ helicase-deficient mice exhibit subfertility, germ cell attrition, ICL sensitivity and tumour predisposition, with HelQ heterozygous mice exhibiting a similar, albeit less severe, phenotype than the null, indicative of haploinsufficiency. We establish that HELQ interacts directly with the RAD51 paralog complex, BCDX2, and functions in parallel to the FA pathway to promote efficient HR at damaged replication forks. Thus, our results reveal a critical role for HELQ in replication-coupled DNA repair, germ cell maintenance and tumour suppression in mammals.