Craig Kaplan’s group, working with Nevan Krogan and Christine Guthrie at UCSF, with contributions from labs at Utrecht Medical Center and the University of British Columbia, have described a high-throughput study of genetic interactions in yeast between a collection of mutations in RNA polymerase II and a subset of the yeast knockout mutation collection. By examining the patterns of nonadditive increased and decreased fitness for polymerase mutations in combinations with mutations that affect other biological processes, the Kaplan, Krogan and Guthrie groups were able to make new functional connections between protein domains in the RNA polymerase complex and other protein complexes. Phenotypic profiles also revealed a correlation between elongation rates for synthesis of the pre-mRNA and efficiency of splicing and transcriptional start site selection.
Phenotypic profiling of RNA polymerase mutants
The work, From Structure to Systems: High-Resolution, Quantitative Genetic Analysis of RNA Polymerase II, is published in the Aug 15 issue of Cell