DISCOVERING GENETIC INTERACTIONS OF THE DEAD-BOX PROTEIN, DBP1

Abstract

Medulloblastoma is the single most common form of malignant brain cancer in children. A molecular understanding of the cellular processes that leads to its formation is imperative in order to design treatments or a cure to this deadly cancer. A recent genomic screening of medulloblastoma patients showed high mutation rates of the gene DDX3X indicating a possible connection to the cancer. Thus, we investigated a yeast ortholog of DDX3X, Dbp1, to gain some insight of the function of the protein within the cell and its role in medulloblastoma formation. In order to gain deeper understanding of this mostly uncharacterized DEADbox RNA helicase, previous lab members perfor med a synthetic lethal screen in Saccharomyces cerevisiae with dbp1null cells. We found that a wild type copy of SHM2, was found to rescue sectoring in one of these synthetic let hal yeast strains. However, it has been documented that shm2 mutations show synthetic lethal interactions with ade3 mutations, so we are unable to conclude that SHM2 has genetic interaction with DBP1. However, this finding can be used to rule out SHM2 as the cause of loss of sectoring phenotype in other dbp1 synthetic lethal mutant strains.