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Human neutrophils respond to multiple chemoattractants to guide their migration from the vasculature to sites of infection and injury, where they clear pathogens and amplify inflammation. To properly focus their responses during this complex navigation, neutrophils prioritize pathogen- and injury-derived signals over long-range inflammatory signals, such as the leukotriene LTB4, secreted by host cells. Different chemoattractants can also drive qualitatively different modes of migration even though their receptors couple to the same Gα i family of G proteins. Here, we used live-cell imaging to demonstrate that the responses differed in their signaling dynamics. Low-priority chemoattractants caused transient responses, whereas responses to high-priority chemoattractants were sustained. We observed this difference in both primary neutrophils and differentiated HL-60 cells, for downstream signaling mediated by Ca 2+ , a major regulator of secretion, and Cdc42, a primary regulator of polarity and cell steering. The rapid attenuation of Cdc42 activation in response to LTB4 depended on the phosphorylation sites Thr 308 and Ser 310 in the carboxyl-terminal tail of its receptor LTB4R in a manner independent of endocytosis. Mutation of these residues to alanine impaired chemoattractant prioritization, although it did not affect chemoattractant-dependent differences in migration persistence. Our results indicate that distinct temporal regulation of shared signaling pathways distinguishes between receptors and contributes to chemoattractant prioritization.

Communication between organelles is an important feature of all eukaryotic cells. To uncover components involved in mitochondria/endoplasmic reticulum (ER) junctions, we screened for mutants that could be complemented by a synthetic protein designed to artificially tether the two organelles. We identified the Mmm1/Mdm10/Mdm12/Mdm34 complex as a molecular tether between ER and mitochondria. The tethering complex was composed of proteins resident of both ER and mitochondria. With the use of genome-wide mapping of genetic interactions, we showed that the components of the tethering complex were functionally connected to phospholipid biosynthesis and calcium-signaling genes. In mutant cells, phospholipid biosynthesis was impaired. The tethering complex localized to discrete foci, suggesting that discrete sites of close apposition between ER and mitochondria facilitate interorganelle calcium and phospholipid exchange.

Protein folding in the endoplasmic reticulum is a complex process whose malfunction is implicated in disease and aging. By using the cell's endogenous sensor (the unfolded protein response), we identified several hundred yeast genes with roles in endoplasmic reticulum folding and systematically characterized their functional interdependencies by measuring unfolded protein response levels in double mutants. This strategy revealed multiple conserved factors critical for endoplasmic reticulum folding, including an intimate dependence on the later secretory pathway, a previously uncharacterized six-protein transmembrane complex, and a co-chaperone complex that delivers tail-anchored proteins to their membrane insertion machinery. The use of a quantitative reporter in a comprehensive screen followed by systematic analysis of genetic dependencies should be broadly applicable to functional dissection of complex cellular processes from yeast to human.

An epistasis map (E-MAP) was constructed in the fission yeast, Schizosaccharomyces pombe, by systematically measuring the phenotypes associated with pairs of mutations. This high-density, quantitative genetic interaction map focused on various aspects of chromosome function, including transcription regulation and DNA repair/replication. The E-MAP uncovered a previously unidentified component of the RNA interference (RNAi) machinery (rsh1) and linked the RNAi pathway to several other biological processes. Comparison of the S. pombe E-MAP to an analogous genetic map from the budding yeast revealed that, whereas negative interactions were conserved between genes involved in similar biological processes, positive interactions and overall genetic profiles between pairs of genes coding for physically associated proteins were even more conserved. Hence, conservation occurs at the level of the functional module (protein complex), but the genetic cross talk between modules can differ substantially.