Characterization of components of the mismatch repair machinery in Trypanosoma brucei.

Mismatch repair is one of a number of DNA repair pathways that cells possess to deal with damage to their genome. Mismatch repair is concerned with the recognition and correction of incorrectly paired bases, which can be base-base mismatches or insertions or deletions of a few bases, and appears to have been conserved throughout evolution. Primarily, this is concerned with increasing the fidelity of DNA replication, but also has important roles in the regulation of homologous recombination and the correction of chemical damage. In this study, we describe five genes in the protistan parasite Trypanosoma brucei that are likely to be involved in nuclear mismatch repair. The predicted T. brucei mismatch repair genes are diverged compared with their likely counterparts in the other eukaryotes examined to date. To demonstrate that these do indeed encode a functional nuclear mismatch repair system, we made T. brucei null mutants in two of the genes, MSH2 and MLH1, that are likely to be central to the functioning of the mismatch repair machinery. These mutations resulted in increased rates of sequence variation at a number of microsatellite loci in the parasite genome, and led to increased tolerance to the alkylating agent N-methyl-N'-nitro-N-nitrosoguanidine, both phenotypes consistent with mismatch repair impairment.

Mismatch repair regulates homologous recombination, but has little influence on antigenic variation, in Trypanosoma brucei.

Antigenic variation is critical in the life of the African trypanosome, as it allows the parasite to survive in the face of host immunity and enhance its transmission to other hosts. Much of trypanosome antigenic variation uses homologous recombination of variant surface glycoprotein (VSG)-encoding genes into specialized transcription sites, but little is known about the processes that regulate it. Here we describe the effects on VSG switching when two central mismatch repair genes, MSH2 and MLH1, are mutated. We show that disruption of the parasite mismatch repair system causes an increased frequency of homologous recombination, both between perfectly matched DNA molecules and between DNA molecules with divergent sequences. Mismatch repair therefore provides an important regulatory role in homologous recombination in this ancient eukaryote. Despite this, the mismatch repair system has no detectable role in regulating antigenic variation, meaning that VSG switching is either immune to mismatch selection or that mismatch repair acts in a subtle manner, undetectable by current assays.