Neurospora crassa has been for decades a principal model for filamentous fungal genetics and physiology as well as for understanding the mechanism of circadian clocks. Eukaryotic fungal and animal clocks comprise transcription-translation-based feedback loops that control rhythmic transcription of a substantial fraction of these transcriptomes, yielding the changes in protein abundance that mediate circadian regulation of physiology and metabolism: Understanding circadian control of gene expression is key to understanding eukaryotic, including fungal, physiology. Indeed, the isolation of clock-controlled genes (ccgs) was pioneered in Neurospora where circadian output begins with binding of the core circadian transcription factor WCC to a subset of ccg promoters, including those of many transcription factors. High temporal resolution (2-h) sampling over 48 h using RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) identified circadianly expressed genes in Neurospora, revealing that from ∼10% to as much 40% of the transcriptome can be expressed under circadian control. Functional classifications of these genes revealed strong enrichment in pathways involving metabolism, protein synthesis, and stress responses; in broad terms, daytime metabolic potential favors catabolism, energy production, and precursor assembly, whereas night activities favor biosynthesis of cellular components and growth. Discriminative regular expression motif elicitation (DREME) identified key promoter motifs highly correlated with the temporal regulation of ccgs. Correlations between ccg abundance from RNA-Seq, the degree of ccg-promoter activation as reported by ccg-promoter-luciferase fusions, and binding of WCC as measured by ChIP-Seq, are not strong. Therefore, although circadian activation is critical to ccg rhythmicity, posttranscriptional regulation plays a major role in determining rhythmicity at the mRNA level.A well-recognized model for fungal genetics, photobiology, and circadian systems, Neurospora is the established model for nearly all aspects of growth and metabolism among the filamentous fungi. The core clock of Neurospora crassa has been well studied; its oscillator comprises a transcription-translation feedback loop involving a complex of five core proteins, White Collar 1 (WC-1), White Collar 2 (WC-2), Frequency (FRQ), Frequency Interacting RNA Helicase (FRH), and Casein Kinase 1 (CK1), as well as several ancillary factors. Transcription factors (TFs) WC-1 and WC-2 form the white collar complex (WCC), which drives the rhythmic expression of FRQ. FRQ binds to FRH to form the FRQ/FRH complex (FFC), which then acts with CK1 on the WCC to inhibit its activity, thus closing the loop. Throughout the circadian cycle, FRQ interacts with many partners that affect the number and location of its posttranslational modifications as well as its stability; it is these posttranslational modifications of FRQ that set the length of the circadian period (1-3).Although historically much interest has focused on clock mechanism, it is through circadian control of transc...
Summary Bioluminescence, the creation and emission of light by organisms, affords insight into the lives of organisms doing it. Luminous living things are widespread and access diverse mechanisms to generate and control luminescence [1-5]. Among the least studied bioluminescent organisms are phylogenetically rare fungi – only 71 species, all within the ~9000 fungi of the temperate and tropical Agaricales Order - are reported from among ~100,000 described fungal species [6,7]. All require oxygen [8] and energy (NADH or NADPH) for bioluminescence, and are reported to emit green light (λmax 530 nm) continuously, implying a metabolic function for bioluminescence, perhaps as a by-product of oxidative metabolism in lignin degradation. Here, however, we report that bioluminescence from the mycelium of Neonothopanus gardneri is controlled by a temperature compensated circadian clock, the result of cycles in content/activity of the luciferase, reductase, and the luciferin that comprise the luminescent system. Because regulation implies an adaptive function for bioluminescence, a controversial question for more than two millenia [8-15], we examined interactions between luminescent fungi and insects [16]. Prosthetic acrylic resin “mushrooms”, internally illuminated by a green LED emitting light similar to the bioluminescence, attract staphilinid rove beetles (coleopterans) as well as hemipterans (true bugs), dipterans (flies), and hymenopterans (wasps and ants) at numbers far greater than dark control traps. Thus, circadian control may optimize energy use for when bioluminescence is most visible, attracting insects that can in turn help in spore dispersal, thereby benefitting fungi growing under the forest canopy where wind flow is greatly reduced.
Light and the circadian clock have a profound effect on the biology of organisms through the regulation of large sets of genes. Toward understanding how light and the circadian clock regulate gene expression, we used genome-wide approaches to identify the direct and indirect targets of the light-responsive and clock-controlled transcription factor ADV-1 in Neurospora crassa. A large proportion of ADV-1 targets were found to be light- and/or clock-controlled, and enriched for genes involved in development, metabolism, cell growth, and cell fusion. We show that ADV-1 is necessary for transducing light and/or temporal information to its immediate downstream targets, including controlling rhythms in genes critical to somatic cell fusion. However, while ADV-1 targets are altered in predictable ways in Δadv-1 cells in response to light, this is not always the case for rhythmic target gene expression. These data suggest that a complex regulatory network downstream of ADV-1 functions to generate distinct temporal dynamics of target gene expression relative to the central clock mechanism.
Neurospora crassa is a model organism for the study of circadian clocks, molecular machineries that confer ∼24-hr rhythms to different processes at the cellular and organismal levels. The FREQUENCY (FRQ) protein is a central component of the Neurospora core clock, a transcription/translation negative feedback loop that controls genome-wide rhythmic gene expression. A genetic screen aimed at determining new components involved in the latter process identified regulation of conidiation 1 (rco-1), the ortholog of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae Tup1 corepressor, as affecting period length. By employing bioluminescent transcriptional and translational fusion reporters, we evaluated frq and FRQ expression levels in the rco-1 mutant background observing that, in contrast to prior reports, frq and FRQ expression are robustly rhythmic in the absence of RCO-1, although both amplitude and period length of the core clock are affected. Moreover, we detected a defect in metabolic compensation, such that high-glucose concentrations in the medium result in a significant decrease in period when RCO-1 is absent. Proteins physically interacting with RCO-1 were identified through co-immunoprecipitation and mass spectrometry; these include several components involved in chromatin remodeling and transcription, some of which, when absent, lead to a slight change in period. In the aggregate, these results indicate a dual role for RCO-1: although it is not essential for core-clock function, it regulates proper period and amplitude of core-clock dynamics and is also required for the rhythmic regulation of several clock-controlled genes.
Mutants in the period-1 (prd-1) gene, characterized by a recessive allele, display a reduced growth rate and period lengthening of the developmental cycle controlled by the circadian clock. We refined the genetic location of prd-1 and used whole genome sequencing to find the mutation defining it, confirming the identity of prd-1 by rescuing the mutant circadian phenotype via transformation. PRD-1 is an RNA helicase whose orthologs, DDX5 [DEAD (Asp-Glu-Ala-Asp) Box Helicase 5] and DDX17 in humans and DBP2 (Dead Box Protein 2) in yeast, are implicated in various processes, including transcriptional regulation, elongation, and termination, ribosome biogenesis, and mRNA decay. Although prd-1 mutants display a long period (∼25 h) circadian developmental cycle, they interestingly display a WT period when the core circadian oscillator is tracked using a frq-luciferase transcriptional fusion under conditions of limiting nutritional carbon; the core oscillator in the prd-1 mutant strain runs with a long period under glucose-sufficient conditions. Thus, PRD-1 clearly impacts the circadian oscillator and is not only part of a metabolic oscillator ancillary to the core clock. PRD-1 is an essential protein, and its expression is neither light-regulated nor clock-regulated. However, it is transiently induced by glucose; in the presence of sufficient glucose, PRD-1 is in the nucleus until glucose runs out, which elicits its disappearance from the nucleus. Because circadian period length is carbon concentration-dependent, prd-1 may be formally viewed as a clock mutant with defective nutritional compensation of circadian period length.T he successful dissection of the molecular bases of circadian rhythms by the circadian community over the past three decades has been anchored, in every system from cyanobacteria to mammals, on the products of classical genetic screens for, and analysis of, circadian clock mutants, their molecular cloning, and the conservation of their function. Circadian period or expression mutants have been identified in a variety of organisms, including Neurospora, Drosophila, blowflies, Paramecium, Chlamydomonas, Arabidopsis, Synechococcus, hamsters, mice, and humans (reviewed in refs. 1-3). Among these circadian clock gene mutants, the greatest number in a single system have come from screens in Neurospora, where upwards of a dozen different genes have emerged from unbiased screens for genes informative of the circadian system. The protein products and cellular functions of nearly all of these genes are known, and this knowledge has played a central role in elucidation of the transcription/translation feedback loop model for animal and fungal clocks that guides most research on mammalian clock mechanism (reviewed, e.g., in refs. 4 and 5). Among these Neurospora genes, the product and role of the period-1 (prd-1) gene remains undescribed.The prd-1 gene [originally called frq-5 (frq, frequency) and later prd] was isolated in a UV-mutagenesis screen for period length mutants (6). On race tubes, the canonical mu...
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