Effect of minichromosome maintenance protein 2 deficiency on the locations of DNA replication origins
- Dimiter Kunnev1,
- Amy Freeland1,
- Maochun Qin2,
- Robert W. Leach2,
- Jianmin Wang2,
- Rajani M. Shenoy1 and
- Steven C. Pruitt1
- 1Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology;
- 2Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, New York 14263, USA
- Corresponding author: steven.pruitt{at}roswellpark.org
Abstract
Minichromosome maintenance (MCM) proteins are loaded onto chromatin during G1-phase and define potential locations of DNA replication initiation. MCM protein deficiency results in genome instability and high rates of cancer in mouse models. Here we develop a method of nascent strand capture and release and show that MCM2 deficiency reduces DNA replication initiation in gene-rich regions of the genome. DNA structural properties are shown to correlate with sequence motifs associated with replication origins and with locations that are preferentially affected by MCM2 deficiency. Reduced nascent strand density correlates with sites of recurrent focal CNVs in tumors arising in MCM2-deficient mice, consistent with a direct relationship between sites of reduced DNA replication initiation and genetic damage. Between 10% and 90% of human tumors, depending on type, carry heterozygous loss or mutation of one or more MCM2-7 genes, which is expected to compromise DNA replication origin licensing and result in elevated rates of genome damage at a subset of gene-rich locations.
Footnotes
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[Supplemental material is available for this article.]
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Article published online before print. Article, supplemental material, and publication date are at http://www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.176099.114.
- Received March 24, 2014.
- Accepted January 26, 2015.
This article is distributed exclusively by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press for the first six months after the full-issue publication date (see http://genome.cshlp.org/site/misc/terms.xhtml). After six months, it is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International), as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
