Understanding normal and cancer cell biology requires the development and application of systems biology approaches capable of probing the functional human proteome, and the protein-protein interactions (PPIs) within it. Such technologies will facilitate our understanding of how molecular events drive phenotypic outcomes, and how these processes are perturbed in disease conditions.
In this thesis, I first describe the development of a mammalian, Gateway compatible, lentivirus-based protein-fragment complementation assay (magical-PCA), for the in vivo high-throughput identification of PPIs in mammalian cells. This technology provides a vast improvement over current PCA methodologies by allowing for pooled, proteome-scale mapping of PPIs in any mammalian cell line of interest, using any bait protein of interest. A proof-of-concept pooled genome-scale screen using the magical-PCA approach was performed using the human mitochondrial protein TOMM22 as a bait, providing evidence that this technology is amenable to proteome-wide screens. Moreover, the TOMM22 screens offered novel insight into links between TOMM22 and proteins involved in mitochondrial organization, apoptosis, and cell cycle dynamics.
Second, I performed a pooled genome-scale magical-PCA screen with the oncoprotein BMI1, a component of the E3 ubiquitin ligase complex involved in histone H2A mono-ubiquitination and gene silencing, to identify novel BMI1 protein interactors. Consequently, I have uncovered a novel physical and functional association between BMI1 and components of the mammalian splicing machinery. I further discovered that BMI1 knockdown influenced the alternative splicing of a number of cellular pre-mRNAs in colon cancer cell lines, suggesting that the association between BMI1 and cellular splicing factors impinges on pre-mRNA processing. Importantly, BMI1 expression was shown to influence the alternative splicing of the SS18 oncoprotein towards an exon 8-excluded isoform, which was shown in this study to promote cell proliferation when assessed in an anchorage-independent growth assay.
Together, these studies highlight the development of a new methodology for the detection and proteome-scale screening of mammalian PPIs. A proof-of-concept screen with human TOMM22 highlighted the utility of the approach, as I was able to detect both strong and weak or transient PPIs. Application of my screening methodology to BMI1 provided crucial insight into the function of this oncoprotein, and BMI1-driven tumorigenesis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/35080 |
| Date | 04 March 2013 |
| Creators | Blakely, Kim |
| Contributors | Moffat, Jason |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Dataset |
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