Biology subjects

Kremer, L. S.

Publications and source records attributed to Kremer, L. S..

6 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2024

Tissue-specific responses to TFAM and mtDNA copy number manipulation in prematurely ageing mice

Somatic mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutations are heavily implicated as important drivers of ageing and age-related diseases. Their pathological effect can be partially counteracted by increasing the absolute amount of wild-type mtDNA via moderately upregulating TFAM, a protein important for mtDNA packaging and expression. However, strong TFAM overexpression can also have detrimental effects as it results in hypercompaction of the mtDNA and subsequent impairment of mtDNA gene expression. In this study, we have experimentally addressed the propensity of moderate TFAM modulation to improve the premature ageing phenotypes of mtDNA mutator mice, carrying random mtDNA mutations. Surprisingly, we detect tissue-specific endogenous compensatory mechanisms acting in mtDNA mutator mice which largely affects the outcome of TFAM modulation. Accordingly, moderate overexpression of TFAM can have both negative and beneficial effects in different tissues of mtDNA mutator mice. We see a similar behavior for moderate TFAM reduction, which improves brown adipocyte tissue homeostasis, while other tissues are largely unaffected. Our findings highlight that regulation of copy number and gene expression of mtDNA is complex and cause tissue-specific effects that should be considered when modulating TFAM levels. Additionally, we suggest that TFAM is not the sole determinant of mtDNA copy number in situations where oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) is compromised but other important players must be involved.

genetics↗

bioRxiv2023

Inhibition of mammalian mtDNA transcription paradoxically activates liver fatty acid oxidation to reverse diet-induced hepatosteatosis and obesity

The oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) system in mammalian mitochondria plays a key role in harvesting energy from ingested nutrients1, 2. Mitochondrial metabolism is very dynamic and can be reprogrammed to support both catabolic and anabolic reactions, depending on physiological demands or disease states3, 4. Rewiring of mitochondrial metabolism is intricately linked to metabolic diseases5, 6 and is also necessary to promote tumour growth7-11. Here, we demonstrate that per oral treatment with an inhibitor of mitochondrial transcription (IMT)11 shifts whole animal metabolism towards fatty acid oxidation, which, in turn, leads to rapid normalization of body weight, reversal of hepatosteatosis and restoration of glucose tolerance in mice on high-fat diet. Paradoxically, the IMT treatment causes a severe reduction of OXPHOS capacity concomitant with a marked upregulation of fatty acid oxidation in the liver, as determined by proteomics and non-targeted metabolomics analyses. The IMT treatment leads to a marked reduction of complex I, the main dehydrogenase that feeds electrons into the ubiquinone (Q) pool, whereas the levels of electron transfer flavoprotein dehydrogenase (ETF-DH) and other dehydrogenases connected to the Q pool are increased. This rewiring of metabolism caused by reduced mtDNA expression in the liver provides a novel principle for drug treatment of obesity and obesity-related pathology.

physiology↗

bioRxiv2022

A role for BCL2L13 and autophagy in germline purifying selection of mtDNA

Mammalian mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is inherited uniparentally through the female germline without undergoing recombination. This poses a major problem as deleterious mtDNA mutations must be eliminated to avoid a mutational meltdown over generations. At least two mechanisms that can decrease the mutation load during maternal transmission are operational: a stochastic bottleneck for mtDNA transmission from mother to child, and a directed purifying selection against transmission of deleterious mtDNA mutations. However, the molecular mechanisms controlling these processes remain unknown. In this study, we systematically tested whether decreased autophagy contributes to purifying selection by crossing the C5024T mouse model harbouring a single pathogenic heteroplasmic mutation in the tRNAAla gene of the mtDNA with different autophagy-deficient mouse models, including knockouts of Parkin, Bcl2l13, Ulk1, and Ulk2. Our study reveals a robust effect of knockout of Bcl2l13 on the selection process, and weaker evidence for the effect of Ulk1 and potentially Ulk2, while no statistically significant impact is seen for knockout of Parkin. This points at distinctive roles of these players in germline purifying selection. Overall, our approach provides a framework for investigating the roles of other important factors involved in the enigmatic process of purifying selection and guides further investigations for the role of BCL2L13 in the elimination of non-synonymous mutations in protein-coding genes.

genetics↗

bioRxiv2022

Mitochondrial phosphoproteomes are functionally specialized across tissues

Mitochondria are essential organelles involved in critical biological processes such as energy metabolism and cell survival. Their dysfunction is linked to numerous human pathologies that often manifest in a tissue-specific manner. Accordingly, mitochondrial fitness depends on versatile proteomes specialized to meet diverse tissue-specific requirements. Furthermore, increasing evidence suggests that phosphorylation may also play an important role in regulating tissue-specific mitochondrial functions and pathophysiology. We hypothesized that recent advances in mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics would now enable in-depth measurement to quantitatively profile mitochondrial proteomes along with their matching phosphoproteomes across tissues. We isolated mitochondria from mouse heart, skeletal muscle, brown adipose tissue, kidney, liver, brain, and spleen by differential centrifugation followed by separation on Percoll gradients and high-resolution MS analysis of the proteomes and phosphoproteomes. This in-depth map substantially quantifies known and predicted mitochondrial proteins and provides a resource of core and tissue modulated mitochondrial proteins (mitophos.de). We also uncover tissue-specific repertoires of dozens of kinases and phosphatases. Predicting kinase substrate associations for different mitochondrial compartments indicates tissue-specific regulation at the phosphoproteome level. Illustrating the functional value of our resource, we reproduce mitochondrial phosphorylation events on DRP1 responsible for its mitochondrial recruitment and fission initiation and describe phosphorylation clusters on MIGA2 linked to mitochondrial fusion.

biochemistry↗

bioRxiv2019

Detection of aberrant splicing events in RNA-seq data with FRASER

Aberrant splicing is a major cause of rare diseases, yet its prediction from genome sequence remains in most cases inconclusive. Recently, RNA sequencing has proven to be an effective complementary avenue to detect aberrant splicing. Here, we developed FRASER, an algorithm to detect aberrant splicing from RNA sequencing data. Unlike existing methods, FRASER captures not only alternative splicing but also intron retention events. This typically doubles the number of detected aberrant events and identified a pathogenic intron retention in MCOLN1. FRASER automatically controls for latent confounders, which are widespread and substantially affect sensitivity. Moreover, FRASER is based on a count distribution and multiple testing correction, reducing the number of calls by two orders of magnitude over commonly applied z score cutoffs, with a minor sensitivity loss. The application to rare disease diagnostics is demonstrated by reprioritizing a pathogenic aberrant exon truncation in TAZ from a published dataset. FRASER is easy to use and freely available.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2017

OCR-Stats: Robust estimation and statistical testing of mitochondrial respiration activities using Seahorse XF Analyzer

Accurate quantification of cellular and mitochondrial bioenergetic activity is of great interest in medicine and biology. Mitochondrial stress tests performed with Seahorse Bioscience XF Analyzers allow estimating different bioenergetic measures by monitoring oxygen consumption rates (OCR) of living cells in multi-well plates. However, studies of statistical best practices for determining OCR measurements and comparisons have been lacking so far. Therefore, we performed mitochondrial stress tests in 126 96-well plates involving 203 fibroblast cell lines to understand how OCR behaves across different biosamples, wells, and plates. We show that the noise of OCR is multiplicative, that outlier data points can concern individual measurements or all measurements of a well, and that the inter-plate variation is greater than intra-plate variation. Based on these insights, we developed a novel statistical method, OCR-Stats, that: i) robustly estimates OCR levels modeling multiplicative noise and automatically identifying outlier data points and outlier wells; and ii) performs statistical testing between samples, taking into account the different magnitudes of the between- and within-plates variations. This led to a significant reduction of the coefficient of variation across plates of basal respiration by 36% and of maximal respiration by 32%. Moreover, using positive and negative controls, we show that our statistical test outperforms existing methods, which either suffer from an excess of false positives (within-plates methods), or of false negatives (between-plates methods). Altogether, the aim of this study is to propose statistical good practices to support experimentalists in designing, analyzing, testing and reporting results of mitochondrial stress tests using this high throughput platform.

bioinformatics↗