Identification of novel modulators of mitochondrial function by a genome-wide RNAi screen in Drosophila melanogaster
- Jian Chen1,
- Xiaoying Shi1,
- Ranjani Padmanabhan1,
- Qiong Wang1,
- Zhidan Wu2,
- Susan C. Stevenson2,
- Marc Hild1,
- Dan Garza1,4, and
- Hao Li3,4
- 1 Developmental and Molecular Pathways, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA;
- 2 Diabetes and Metabolism Disease Area, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA;
- 3 NIBR Patents, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
Abstract
Mitochondrial dysfunction is associated with many human diseases. There has not been a systematic genetic approach for identifying regulators of basal mitochondrial biogenesis and function in higher eukaryotes. We performed a genome-wide RNA interference (RNAi) screen in Drosophila cells using mitochondrial Citrate synthase (CS) activity as the primary readout. We screened 13,071 dsRNAs and identified 152 genes that modulate CS activity. These modulators are involved in a wide range of biological processes and pathways including mitochondrial-related functions, transcriptional and translational regulation, and signaling pathways. Selected hits among the 152 genes were further analyzed for their effect on mitochondrial CS activity in transgenic flies or fly mutants. We confirmed a number of gene hits including HDAC6, Rpd3(HDAC1), CG3249, vimar, Src42A, klumpfuss, barren, and smt3 which exert effects on mitochondrial CS activities in vivo, demonstrating the value of Drosophila genome-wide RNAi screens for identifying genes and pathways that modulate mitochondrial function.
Footnotes
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↵4 Corresponding authors.
↵4 E-mail hao.li{at}novartis.com; fax (617) 871-7041.
↵4 E-mail dan.garza{at}novartis.com; fax (617) 871-4080.
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[Supplemental material is available online at www.genome.org.]
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Article published online before print. Article and publication date are at http://www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.6940108
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- Received January 30, 2007.
- Accepted October 16, 2007.
- Copyright © 2008, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
