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Journal of Bacteriology, August 2003, p. 4626-4629, Vol. 185, No. 15
0021-9193/03/$08.00+0 DOI: 10.1128/JB.185.15.4626-4629.2003
Copyright © 2003, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
Competition between MutY and Mismatch Repair at A · C Mispairs In Vivo
Mandy Kim, Tiffany Huang, and Jeffrey H. Miller*
Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics and The Molecular Biology Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095
Received 3 March 2003/
Accepted 8 May 2003

ABSTRACT
We show that the MutY protein competes with the MutS-dependent
mismatch repair system to process at least some A · C
mispairs in vivo, converting them to G · C pairs. In
the presence of an increased dCTP pool resulting from the loss
of nucleotide diphosphate kinase, the frequency of A ·
T

G · C transitions at a hot spot in the
rpoB gene is
30-fold lower in a MutY-deficient derivative than in the wild
type.

TEXT
The MutY protein, the product of the
mutY gene in
Escherichia coli (
18), is a glycosylase that plays an important role in
the repair of oxidatively damaged DNA (
11,
12). Loss of function
in both chromosomal copies of the human gene encoding MutY leads
to increased susceptibility to colon cancer in humans (
1,
9).
MutY removes A residues that are mispaired with 7,8-dihydro-8-oxoguanine
(oxoG) (
11,
13), a frequent oxidation product of DNA (
4). This
removal allows repair polymerases to restore a C across from
the 8-oxoG (
25), allowing the MutM protein to remove the 8-oxoG
(
11,
13; for reviews, see references
12 and
15). Subsequent
repair synthesis restores the original G · C base pair.
MutY also removes the A from A · G mispairs (
2), from
A · 8-oxoA mispairs (
13), and, to a lesser extent, from
A · C mispairs (
13,
21). Because the MutY protein does
not discriminate between old and new strands, the ability to
remove A from A · C mispairs may potentially immortalize
mutations stemming from A · C mispairs in which A is
the correct base, even though these mispairs may be substrates
for correction by the MutSHL-dependent mismatch repair (MMR)
system (for a review, see reference
17). In these cases, the
original A · T base pair would be converted to a G ·
C base pair. In this sense, the MutY protein competes with the
MMR system for the processing of A · C mispairs. Figure
1 portrays the different outcomes of A · C mispairs arising
from replication errors at an A · T base pair.
The E. coli rpoB/Rifr system.
We decided to study the contribution of the MutY protein to
A · T

G · C mutations that can arise via an A ·
C mispair by using the previously described
E. coli rpoB/Rif
r system to monitor mutations (
7). We have extended the work of
others (
8,
19,
22-
24) to generate a system that can analyze
69 different base substitutions in the
rpoB gene (
7). Recent
work (
20; E. Wolff, M. Kim, and J. H. Miller, unpublished data)
has added several sites to this collection, so that as many
as 73 different base substitutions can be monitored by analyzing
E. coli Rif
r mutants at 37°C (Table
1). Of these 73 mutations,
one particular A · T

G · C mutation, at bp 1547,
is a hot spot in a wild-type background and a very strong hot
spot in a
mutS background (
7,
16). Although it is not clear
what proportion of the A · T

G · C transition mutations
at this site result from A · C rather than T ·
G mispairs, comparing the rates of mutations at this hot spot
in wild-type and
mutY backgrounds seems to be a straightforward
way to look for effects of the presence or absence of MutY on
transitions. However, G · C

T · A mutations are
elevated in a
mutY background, significantly increasing the
Rif
r mutant frequencies (
17) (Table
2). Only a small percentage
of the Rif
r mutants would be caused by other mutations. Thus,
13 of 15 mutations in
rpoB obtained in a
mutY strain result
from G · C

T · A transversions (Table
1). Therefore,
we sought to increase the level of A · C mispairs by
employing a strain with a defect in the
ndk gene (
16), which
encodes the enzyme nucleotide diphosphate kinase. Nucleotide
diphosphate kinase is involved in maintaining nucleotide triphosphate
levels, and
ndk mutant strains have 20-fold-higher levels of
dCTP and 7-fold-higher levels of dGTP, as well as higher levels
of spontaneous mutations (
10), than do strains without a defect
in the
ndk gene. We have analyzed the mutator effect of
ndk strains and shown that certain base substitutions and frameshifts
are considerably elevated in
ndk mutS double mutants, indicating
that replication errors are involved (
16). Among mutations in
rpoB leading to Rif
r, the mutations in both
ndk and
ndk mutS strains predominate at the A · T

G · C hot spot
at bp 1547 (
16). Because the level of mutations at this hot
spot in
ndk strains is high enough, we can determine whether
the MutY protein is involved in generating A · T

G ·
C mutations at the bp 1547 hot spot by comparing the levels
of mutations at this site in
ndk and
ndk mutY strains (for methods,
see references 7 and 14).
Distribution of mutations in rpoB.
Table
1 shows the distribution of
rpoB mutations in wild-type,
mutS,
mutY, and
ndk strains and in the
ndk mutY and
mutS mutY double mutants. Table
2 shows some comparative mutation frequencies
and mutation rates per replication.
ndk strains have 43-fold-higher
rates of
rpoB mutations that lead to Rif
r colonies than the
wild type, and
mutS strains have approximately a 80-fold-higher
mutation rate (Table
2) than the wild type, although most of
the mutations in the
ndk and
mutS strains are at one site (position
1547; A · T

G · C) (Table
1). The defect in
mutY has no detectable effect on the mutation rate in
mutS strains
(data not shown) and no effect on the
mutS spectrum (Table
1;
note the different sample sizes). This lack of effect occurs
because in the absence of MMR, which is the consequence of being
a
mutS mutant, there is no way to repair A · C mismatches,
derived from A · T base pairs (Fig.
1A), regardless of
the presence or absence of the MutY protein. However, in an
ndk strain that is MMR proficient, the defect in the
mutY gene
lowers the frequency of mutations in
rpoB 2.5- to 3-fold (Table
2) and, most importantly, virtually eliminates the position
1547 A · T

G · C hot spot from the mutational
spectrum (Table
1). In the absence of this hot spot, the next
most frequent mutation, A · T

T · A at position
443, now becomes the most frequent mutation and appears as a
new hot spot. Figure
2 incorporates the mutation frequencies
into the comparison of the
ndk and
ndk mutY spectra and shows
that MutY-deficient derivatives of
ndk strains have 30-fold-lower
levels of A · T

G · C mutations at position 1547
in
rpoB. (The apparent severalfold increase of A · T

T
· A mutations at position 443 may not be significant,
because of the small sample size of these mutations at position
443 in the distribution for the
ndk mutants.) This finding demonstrates
an in vivo effect of MutY on increasing transition mutations
at certain A · T base pairs due to its ability to remove
A from A · C mispairs and represents an example of a
repair enzyme actually being involved in creating mutations
under certain conditions. The effect of MutY on lowering A ·
T

G · C transversions in a
mutT background has been described
previously (
6,
26), as has a 4.6-fold decrease in A ·
T

G · C mutations at one site in
trpA (
6).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by a grant from the National Institutes
of Health (grant ES0110875).

FOOTNOTES
* Corresponding author. Mailing address: Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics, UCLA, 405 Hilgard Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90095. Phone: (310) 825-8460. Fax: (310) 206-3088. E-mail:
jhmiller{at}mbi.ucla.edu.


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Journal of Bacteriology, August 2003, p. 4626-4629, Vol. 185, No. 15
0021-9193/03/$08.00+0 DOI: 10.1128/JB.185.15.4626-4629.2003
Copyright © 2003, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
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