Understanding and predicting synthetic lethal genetic interactions in Saccharomyces cerevisiae using domain genetic interactions

TL;DR

This study reveals that domain-level genetic interactions explain yeast synthetic lethal interactions and can predict new interactions, enhancing understanding of protein functions and pathways.

Contribution

It introduces a domain-based approach to explain and predict synthetic lethal genetic interactions in yeast, providing new insights into protein domain functions.

Findings

Domain genetic interactions rarely overlap with physical interactions.

Domains in multidomain proteins contribute differently to genetic interactions.

Predicted novel synthetic lethal interactions and compensatory pathways.

Abstract

Genetic interactions have been widely used to define functional relationships between proteins and pathways. In this study, we demonstrated that yeast synthetic lethal genetic interactions can be explained by the genetic interactions between domains of those proteins. The domain genetic interactions rarely overlap with the domain physical interactions from iPfam database and provide a complementary view about domain relationships. Moreover, we found that domains in multidomain yeast proteins contribute to their genetic interactions differently. The domain genetic interactions help more precisely define the function related to the synthetic lethal genetic interactions, and then help understand how domains contribute to different functionalities of multidomain proteins. Using the probabilities of domain genetic interactions, we were able to predict novel yeast synthetic lethal genetic interactions. Furthermore, we had also identified novel compensatory pathways from the predicted synthetic lethal genetic interactions. Our study significantly improved the understanding of yeast mulitdomain proteins, the synthetic lethal genetic interactions and the functional relationships between proteins and pathways.