iScience
Volume 9, 30 November 2018, Pages 192-208
Journal home page for iScience

Article
Unexpected Evolution of Lesion-Recognition Modules in Eukaryotic NER and Kinetoplast DNA Dynamics Proteins from Bacterial Mobile Elements

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2018.10.017Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Two eukaryotic acquisitions of the ArdC-N domain from bacterial mobile elements

  • The first spawned the β-hairpin domains of the nucleotide excision repair proteins

  • The second gave rise to Tc-38-like proteins involved in kinetoplastid kDNA dynamics

  • Multiple selfish-element-derived components relate to plasmid-like features of kDNA

Summary

The provenance of several components of major uniquely eukaryotic molecular machines are increasingly being traced back to prokaryotic biological conflict systems. Here, we demonstrate that the N-terminal single-stranded DNA-binding domain from the anti-restriction protein ArdC, deployed by bacterial mobile elements against their host, was independently acquired twice by eukaryotes, giving rise to the DNA-binding domains of XPC/Rad4 and the Tc-38-like proteins in the stem kinetoplastid. In both instances, the ArdC-N domain tandemly duplicated forming an extensive DNA-binding interface. In XPC/Rad4, the ArdC-N domains (BHDs) also fused to the inactive transglutaminase domain of a peptide-N-glycanase ultimately derived from an archaeal conflict system. Alongside, we delineate several parallel acquisitions from conjugative elements/bacteriophages that gave rise to key components of the kinetoplast DNA (kDNA) replication apparatus. These findings resolve two outstanding questions in eukaryote biology: (1) the origin of the unique DNA lesion-recognition component of NER and (2) origin of the unusual, plasmid-like features of kDNA.

Subject Areas

Genetics
Molecular Biology
Microbiology
Evolutionary Biology

Cited by (0)

2

These authors contributed equally

3

Lead Contact