Publication of IMPRS-LS student Susanne Bantele

Bantele, S.C., Ferreira, P., Gritenaite, D., Boos, D., and Pfander, B.
Elife, 2017, 6.

Targeting of the Fun30 nucleosome remodeller by the Dpb11 scaffold facilitates cell cycle-regulated DNA end resection.

DNA double strand breaks (DSBs) can be repaired by either recombination-based or direct ligation-based mechanisms. Pathway choice is made at the level of DNA end resection, a nucleolytic processing step, which primes DSBs for repair by recombination. Resection is thus under cell cycle control, but additionally regulated by chromatin and nucleosome remodellers. Here we show that both layers of control converge in the regulation of resection by the evolutionarily conserved Fun30/SMARCAD1 remodeller. Yeast Fun30 and human SMARCAD1 are cell cycle-regulated by interaction with the DSB-localized scaffold proteins Dpb11 and TOPBP1, respectively. In yeast this protein assembly additionally comprises the 9-1-1 damage sensor, is involved in localizing Fun30 to damaged chromatin and thus is required for efficient long-range resection of DSBs. Notably, artificial targeting of Fun30 to DSBs is sufficient to bypass the cell cycle regulation of long-range resection, indicating that chromatin remodelling during resection is underlying DSB repair pathway choice.