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. 2010 Jul 21;2:609–619. doi: 10.1093/gbe/evq045

The Effect of Chaperonin Buffering on Protein Evolution

Tom A Williams 1, Mario A Fares 1,2,*
PMCID: PMC3296372  PMID: 20660109

Abstract

Molecular chaperones are highly conserved and ubiquitous proteins that help other proteins in the cell to fold. Pioneering work by Rutherford and Lindquist suggested that the chaperone Hsp90 could buffer (i.e., suppress) phenotypic variation in its client proteins and that alternate periods of buffering and expression of these variants might be important in adaptive evolution. More recently, Tokuriki and Tawfik presented an explicit mechanism for chaperone-dependent evolution, in which the Escherichia coli chaperonin GroEL facilitated the folding of clients that had accumulated structurally destabilizing but neofunctionalizing mutations in the protein core. But how important an evolutionary force is chaperonin-mediated buffering in nature? Here, we address this question by modeling the per-residue evolutionary rate of the crystallized E. coli proteome, evaluating the relative contributions of chaperonin buffering, functional importance, and structural features such as residue contact density. Previous findings suggest an interaction between codon bias and GroEL in limiting the effects of misfolding errors. Our results suggest that the buffering of deleterious mutations by GroEL increases the evolutionary rate of client proteins. We then examine the evolutionary fate of GroEL clients in the Mycoplasmas, a group of bacteria containing the only known organisms that lack chaperonins. We show that GroEL was lost once in the common ancestor of a monophyletic subgroup of Mycoplasmas, and we evaluate the effect of this loss on the subsequent evolution of client proteins, providing evidence that client homologs in 11 Mycoplasma species have lost their obligate dependency on GroEL for folding. Our analyses indicate that individual molecules such as chaperonins can have significant effects on proteome evolution through their modulation of protein folding.

Keywords: chaperonin buffering, GroEL, clients, mycoplasma

Introduction

Although many newly synthesized proteins fold spontaneously into the correct, functional 3D shape (Anfinsen 1973), some require the assistance of accessory proteins called molecular chaperones. Chaperones interact noncovalently with their client proteins, preventing the aggregation of unfolded polypeptides and promoting proper folding through a variety of mechanisms (Hartl and Hayer-Hartl 2009).

Through their modulation of the relationship between a protein's primary sequence and final structure—that is, between genotype and phenotype—chaperones have been proposed to facilitate the adaptive evolution of their client proteins (Rutherford and Lindquist 1998; Fares et al. 2002; Queitsch et al. 2002; Tokuriki and Tawfik 2009a, 2009b; Lindquist 2010). The pioneering work in this area was that of Rutherford and Lindquist (1998), who demonstrated that the chaperone Hsp90 suppresses (or buffers) the phenotypic effect of deleterious mutations in its clients, which are mainly signaling proteins. They found that the reduction of Hsp90 activity resulted in the expression of underlying developmental abnormalities in Drosophila. When subject to selection, these variants could be enriched in the population to the point where, combined in a single genome, they could no longer be suppressed by restored Hsp90 function. The fixation of a set of mutations in this way might cause an “adaptive leap” from one developmental pathway to another, explaining the phenomenon of “genetic assimilation” that had previously been observed by Waddington (1953). Since this initial discovery, Hsp90-buffered variation has been documented in other eukaryotes including Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Cowen and Lindquist 2005) and Arabidopsis thaliana (Sangster et al. 2007, 2008).

Work on the chaperonin GroEL/GroES of Escherichia coli, an unrelated molecular chaperone, has provided evidence for another mechanism by which chaperone buffering affects client protein evolution. Moran (1996) suggested that overexpression of GroEL/GroES in endosymbiotic bacteria was an evolutionary response to the high levels of genetic drift—and therefore high mutational load—experienced by these intracellular organisms, the idea being that higher levels of GroEL would enable the cell to continue functioning as deleterious mutations accumulated in the proteome. This hypothesis was supported by Fares et al. (2002), who showed that overexpression of GroEL recovered the fitness of E. coli strains exposed to strong genetic drift, whereas a recent bioinformatic analysis suggested that GroEL clients experience weaker selection for translationally optimal codon usage in comparison with nonclients, perhaps due to a reduced need to prevent mistranslation (Warnecke and Hurst 2010). Far from being contradictory mechanisms, the authors suggested that GroEL buffering and codon usage may represent two complimentary ways by which organisms can limit protein misfolding errors (Warnecke and Hurst 2010).

The first concrete evidence that chaperonin buffering might act as more than a coping mechanism was provided by Tokuriki and Tawfik (2009a), who performed experimental evolution on four enzymes in E. coli with and without GroEL/GroES overexpression. Their results showed that GroEL/GroES could maintain the function of enzymes that had accumulated highly destabilizing mutations in their core. Even more interesting was their attempt to enhance the inefficient esterase activity of one of the enzymes, Pseudomonas phosphotriesterase, by artificial selection in the presence and absence of GroEL/GroES. The esterase activity that evolved in the presence of GroEL was far more efficient than that which could be obtained without GroEL because it depended upon a destabilizing mutation that reduced the rate of folding and greatly reduced enzyme activity in the absence of chaperonin buffering. Along with some existing evidence that functionally important mutations are often destabilizing (Wang et al. 2002; Tokuriki et al. 2008), this result provides a straightforward explanation for how chaperone buffering of deleterious mutations could be involved in the evolution of new functions in client proteins.

Despite this experimental evidence, the extent to which chaperones facilitate the evolution of their client proteins in nature remains unclear. In particular, chaperones may not only buffer deleterious variants but also expose them to proteolysis (Kandror et al. 1994; Tomala and Korona 2008). Tokuriki and Tawfik (2009a) performed their experimental evolution combining GroEL/GroES overexpression with strong purifying selection during each round of evolution: if chaperones really do buffer phenotypic variation in their clients, then the strength of selection acting on clients should be weaker than that acting on nonclients. Here, we evaluate the effect of chaperonin buffering on client protein evolutionary rate, using data from 85 gamma-proteobacterial genomes. This question can be approached bioinformatically due to two recent, systematic classifications of the E. coli proteome into client and nonclient portions (Kerner et al. 2005; Fujiwara et al. 2010). Kerner et al. (2005) identified 252 proteins that were repeatedly isolated from GroEL/GroES complexes, of which 85 were found so frequently as to suggest all copies of that protein required assistance from the chaperonin complex in order to fold (obligate clients). Fujiwara et al. (2010) examined the solubility of these clients in GroEL/GroES-depleted cells and found that 49/85 of the obligate clients of Kerner et al. (2005), along with another eight proteins, were absolutely dependent on the chaperonin complex for folding. After controlling for several factors known to influence evolutionary rate, we compare the evolution of clients and nonclients under all these classifications.

We then examine the evolutionary fate of GroEL client proteins in the Mycoplasmas, a group of highly derived bacteria with small genomes that contains the only organisms lacking GroEL/GroES yet described (Woese 1987; Lund 2009). We examine whether the loss of GroEL has lead to a loss of obligate client proteins or whether Mycoplasma client homologs have adapted to life without GroEL, as has been reported for Ureaplasma (Fujiwara et al. 2010).

Materials and Methods

Gamma-Proteobacterial Structures and Alignments

All available crystallized protein structures for the gamma-proteobacteria (mostly from E. coli) were downloaded from the Protein Data Bank (PDB, http://www.rcsb.org/pdb). The resulting data set contained 1,000 PDB entries (and 1,075 protein chains—see supplementary material, Supplementary Material online), representing 20–25% of the E. coli proteome and half (126/252) of known GroEL clients (Kerner et al. 2005), although it was not overenriched for any of the functional categories in the Clusters of Orthologous Groups ontology system (Tatusov et al. 2003). Protein sequences homologous to the structure-associated sequences were retrieved by reciprocal Blast searching of 85 complete gamma-proteobacterial proteomes (see supplementary material, Supplementary Material online), only considering reciprocal hits with E values < 10−4 where the length of the whole protein was within the range of ±25% of the structure sequence. We limited the set of sequences to this range of lengths in order to ensure that only proteins with the same structure and function would be ;included. Sets of homologs were aligned with ClustalW using the default parameters (Thompson et al. 1994), and the quality of the alignments was inspected manually. Only those alignment columns that could be aligned to the structure sequence were used in our subsequent analyses.

Analysis of Protein Evolutionary Rate

Classification of the E. coli proteome into clients and nonclients was carried out on the basis of the system of Kerner et al. (2005), who performed a proteome-wide screen for GroEL clients by trapping and then characterizing proteins encapsulated within GroEL/GroES complexes. GroEL interactors were further subdivided into facultative (class I and II) or obligate (class III) clients depending on the proportion associated with GroEL/GroES complexes versus the total amount of that protein in the cell. Recently, another study screened for obligate GroEL clients by identifying proteins that aggregate or are degraded in GroEL/GroES-depleted cells (Fujiwara et al. 2010). Their results overlap with, but do not exactly match, those of Kerner et al. (2005) because about 40% of class III clients remain soluble during GroEL/GroES underexpression. In our analysis, we use both classifications when assessing the effect of chaperonin buffering. It is possible that these screens failed to identify all GroEL clients in the E. coli proteome; however, we do not think that a (presumably small) proportion of unclassified clients among our set of nonclient proteins will have a serious effect on the analyses reported below—if anything, they ought to make the results more conservative.

Data on gene essentiality were downloaded from the SHIGEN Profiling of E. coli Chromosome database (Hashimoto et al. 2005; Kato and Hashimoto 2007). A gene is defined as essential if strains carrying a null mutation cannot grow under any conditions. Protein–protein interactions were quantified using the combined interaction data set from Bacteriome.org, which contains 7,613 experimentally determined interactions between 2,283 E. coli proteins (Peregrín-Alvarez et al. 2009). In order to avoid trivially biasing our results toward a greater number of client interactions, we removed all interactions involving GroEL/GroES from the data set. We used gene expression data from the genome-wide study of Covert et al. (2004), using the dChip-normalized mean mRNA expression value across three replicates for wild-type E. coli cells growing in aerobic conditions. In the analyses reported below, we only used expression data when all three replicates were called as present on the array (resulting in data for 226/252 clients and 2,889/3,892 nonclients in the E. coli genome). Repeating the analyses using all expression data (regardless of quality) gave results which were qualitatively the same.

Per-residue estimates of evolutionary rate were calculated as follows: for each column in a protein sequence alignment, we counted the number of pairwise differences between residues x and the total number of comparisons n. To account for multiple substitutions, we applied the Poisson correction to the proportion of differences x/n to obtain a distance d for that column:

graphic file with name gbeevq045fx1_ht.jpg

Per-residue amino acid contact density was defined as the number of other residues within 4 Å of the site of interest (Toft and Fares 2010). For each atom in an amino acid, we calculated the Euclidean distance between it and all atoms in the other amino acids in the crystal structure. The distance between two amino acids was taken to be the minimum of the atomic distances between the two residues:

graphic file with name gbeevq045fx2_ht.jpg

where i and j represent all atoms in amino acids 1 and 2, respectively.

To evaluate the effect of chaperonin buffering on evolutionary rate after accounting for essentiality, amino acid contact density, gene expression level, and protein–protein interactions, we performed an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) using the statistical software R (R Development Core Team 2010). The ANCOVA was fit using the lm function. We used this approximation because this function represents a conservative relationship between the different factors and because modeling the relationships between more than two factors is both computationally expensive and combinatorially prohibitive. We are, however, aware of the fact that this linear modeling might represent a simplistic view of the interaction between factor effects, although a systematic bias toward the covariance of two particular factors due to the model is unlikely. We compared the fit of models including 1) all main effects and interactions and 2) just main effects with an analysis of variance. The model without interactions fit the data significantly worse (P < 10−15), prompting the retention of the more complex model. To circumvent the problem of model overfitting, we assessed the significance of individual terms in the ANCOVA using the “step” function implemented in R, which uses Akaike's information criterion (AIC) to remove terms that do not significantly improve model fit—that is, models that increase the AIC value—resulting in the set of minimal adequate models discussed below.

In order to evaluate whether our results were due to bias introduced by phylogenetic nonindependence of the 85 gamma-proteobacterial genomes used, we recalculated Poisson distances using a reduced subset of our data comprising one species per genus and reanalyzed the data as described above. The representative sequence from each genus was chosen at random because none of the within-genus sequences presented distinctive characteristics regarding genome size, codon composition, etc. The results were qualitatively very similar (see supplementary tables 8–12, Supplementary Material online), suggesting that the effects discussed below are not an artifact of biased phylogenetic coverage. The numbers reported below are from the original analysis, which uses all of the available data. We would also like to stress that biases in our results due to the phylogenetic nonindependence of sequences should affect clients and nonclients equally and should not, therefore, bias tendencies systematically one way or the other. In other words, sequences are phylogenetically dependent but proteins are not.

Mycoplasma Sequences and Analysis

Four Mycoplasma genomes that contain a GroEL homolog (Mycoplasma penetrans HF-2, Mycoplasma genitalium G37, Mycoplasma gallisepticum R, and Mycoplasma pneumoniae M129) and seven that do not (Mycoplasma pulmonis UAB CTIP, Mycoplasma capricolum subsp. capricolum ATCC 27343, Mycoplasma mobile 163K, Mycoplasma arthritidis 158L3-1, Mycoplasma mycoides subsp. mycoides SC str. PG1, Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae 232, and Mycoplasma synoviae) were downloaded from National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) (accession numbers provided in supplementary table 3, Supplementary Material online), with the presence or absence of GroEL being assessed manually using NCBI Web-Blast, using the M. penetrans HF-2 protein sequence (NP_757486.1) as the initial query. The E. coli proteome was divided into clients and nonclients as described above, and each set of genes was Blasted against these 11 genomes. Only 29 of the 252 E. coli GroEL clients had significant hits against all 11 Mycoplasma genomes (defined as an E value < 10−7, which we found by manual experimentation to be a good trade-off between false positive and false negative presence/absence calls. In order to increase the size of our data set, we also included genes that were present in at least 3/4 Mycoplasma genomes with GroEL and 6/7 genomes without. This resulted in a set of 57 Mycoplasma homologs of E. coli GroEL clients and 282 homologs of nonclients, with 9–11 Mycoplasma sequences per gene.

To evaluate whether GroEL client proteins in E. coli have been preferentially lost from Mycoplasmas that lack GroEL, we used an ANCOVA (fitted with the glm function in R, with binomial errors) in which a binary response variable reports the presence or absence of a homolog to each protein in the E. coli proteome in a given Mycoplasma species (where presence is defined as a BlastP hit at E < 10−7) and with client/nonclient status, essentiality, number of protein–protein interactions and mRNA expression level as the explanatory variables.

To investigate the evolution of GroEL client proteins within the Mycoplasmas, we built protein sequence alignments from the 57 genes homologous to E. coli GroEL clients using MUSCLE 3.7 (Edgar 2004) under the default parameters. These alignments were used to build 100 bootstrap maximum likelihood phylogenetic trees with RaxML 7.04 (Stamatakis 2006), using a substitution model chosen by ProtTest (Abascal et al. 2005) in each case. Forty-nine of fifty-seven consensus trees suggested the topology shown in figure 2, in which a single loss of GroEL occurred within the Mycoplasmas. This consensus topology was then used for comparison of selective constraint between Mycoplasmas with and without GroEL.

FIG. 2.—

FIG. 2.—

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Phylogeny of Mycoplasma genomes with and without GroEL. Forty-nine of fifty-seven Mycoplasma homologs of Escherichia coli GroEL clients support a topology in which the Mycoplasma species that have retained GroEL (red) cluster to the exclusion of those that have lost it (black), suggesting a single loss of GroEL within this group of organisms. Each client protein maximum likelihood tree was built using RaxML, using 100 bootstraps.

For each client and nonclient alignment, we calculated the nonsynonymous-to-synonymous substitution ratio (dN/dS) under maximum likelihood using the program codeml, from the PAML package version 4.0 (Yang 2007). In each case, we compared two models: one in which a single dN/dS ratio applies across the tree and one in which the genomes with and without GroEL evolve under different ratios. These models were compared with a likelihood ratio test for which the null distribution is a chi-squared distribution with one degree of freedom. The numbers of client and nonclient homologs that were evolving significantly faster in GroEL-lacking Mycoplasma were then compared with a chi-squared test.

Mycoplasma genomes lacking GroEL were not impoverished for GroEL clients when compared with Mycoplasmas with GroEL, raising the possibility that intrinsic changes in these proteins occurred in non-GroEL Mycoplasmas that made them independent from GroEL. To evaluate this possibility, we tested whether the amino acid compositions or molecular weights of the proteins from Mycoplasmas with GroEL differed significantly from those in Mycoplasmas without GroEL. The molecular weights of client homologs in Mycoplasmas with and without GroEL were calculated by summing the weights of their constituent amino acids and, for each protein, calculating a mean protein molecular weight for Mycoplasmas with and those without GroEL. Weights were compared with Wilcoxon two-sampled paired signed rank test. Amino acid compositions were compared in a similar way, with mean proportions for each amino acid in each protein in Mycoplasmas with and without-GroEL being compared with Wilcoxon two-sampled paired rank tests, using the Bonferroni correction to account for multiple testing.

Results and Discussion

The Functional Importance of GroEL Client Proteins

As outlined in the introduction, the idea that molecular chaperones buffer the phenotypic effects of mutations in their clients is critical to the hypothesis that chaperones facilitate adaptive evolution (Rutherford and Lindquist 1998; Tokuriki and Tawfik 2009a). Assuming that most mutations affecting phenotype are—at least individually—neutral or deleterious (Kimura 1983), if selection against such mutations is weaker in GroEL clients than nonclients due to a buffering effect (Tokuriki and Tawfik 2009a), then clients ought to evolve faster than nonclients. However, precisely the opposite trend has been reported (Hirtreiter et al. 2009), with GroEL preferentially chaperoning slow-evolving proteins. The same trend was apparent in our data set of 1,075 gamma-proteobacterial proteins, with clients evolving significantly more slowly than nonclients (mean Poisson distance in clients = 0.147, nonclients = 0.178, P < 10−15, Mann–Whitney U test). Does this result falsify the chaperone buffering hypothesis? No, because it does not take into account the many factors that influence evolutionary rate. For instance, if clients are enriched for characteristics that constrain evolution, these might mask a buffering effect. We compared the functional importance of clients and nonclients in terms of essentiality, number of protein–protein interactions, and mRNA expression levels. All these factors have previously been observed to influence evolutionary rate (Krylov et al. 2003; Drummond and Wilke 2008; Wolf et al. 2010), although their relative importance is a matter of some debate (Bloom and Adami 2003; Jordan et al. 2003; Pal et al. 2003). We found striking differences between clients and nonclients in terms of essentiality and protein–protein interactions, with clients significantly more likely to prove essential upon single-gene knockout (43/248 essential clients, 242/3,900 essential nonclients, P < 10−3, χ2 test) and participating in significantly more protein–protein interactions than nonclients (mean 13.7 for clients, 5.9 for nonclients, P = 1.6 × 10−14, Mann–Whitney U test), even after interactions with GroEL/GroES are removed from the data set. At the level of mRNA expression, clients are expressed at a significantly higher level than nonclients in wild-type E. coli cells growing aerobically (mean client probe intensity 2,186, nonclient 1,290, P < 10−15, Mann–Whitney U test), although obligate clients were expressed at a lower level than facultative clients (1683 vs. 2425, P = 0.0008328, Mann–Whitney U test).

Taken together, these results suggest that client proteins are, on average, of greater functional importance than nonclients. Because a higher proportion of essential genes, a higher number of protein–protein interactions, and higher mRNA expression levels are all either weakly or strongly associated with a decrease in evolutionary rate (Krylov et al. 2003; Drummond and Wilke 2008; Wolf et al. 2010), their influence must be accounted for when evaluating the effect of chaperonin buffering on client protein evolution.

GroEL Buffers the Evolution of Its Obligate Clients

To evaluate the relative contributions of chaperone buffering, essentiality, network connectivity (in terms of protein–protein interactions) and expression level on evolutionary rate, we performed an ANCOVA with one response variable, per-residue Poisson distance, and five explanatory variables: two categorical (client/nonclient and essential/nonessential) and three continuous: number of protein–protein interactions, mRNA expression level (in mean probe intensity across three replicates), and amino acid contact density. This final covariate, which quantifies the number of other residues within a 4 Å radius of a particular amino acid site, has previously been shown to correlate negatively with evolutionary rate: that is, amino acids surrounded by large numbers of other residues (such as in the protein core) evolve relatively slowly (Thorne et al. 1996; Goldman et al. 1998; Bustamante et al. 2000; Mintseris and Weng 2005; Bloom et al. 2006; Conant and Stadler 2009; Toft and Fares 2010).

We performed four different analyses, in which GroEL clients were defined in four different ways: 1) all 252 GroEL/GroES interactors identified by Kerner et al. (2005)—that is, both facultative and obligate clients; 2) 85 obligate clients only (as defined by Kerner et al. [2005]); 3) 57 obligate clients as defined by Fujiwara et al. (2010); and 4) the 34 obligate clients classified by Kerner et al. (2005) that do not depend on GroEL/GroES for solubility. An important difference exists between categories (2) and (3). Kerner et al. (2005) classified clients according to their enrichment in GroEL/GroES complexes. If more than 4% of the total cellular content of a particular protein was associated with GroEL/GroES, they inferred that all copies of that protein needed to interact with the chaperonin complex in order to reach their native conformation, making it an obligate “Class III” client. Proteins that were reliably isolated from GroEL/GroES complexes at lower levels of enrichment were assigned to two classes of facultative clients. Fujiwara et al. (2010) took a more direct approach, measuring the solubility of Class III clients in GroEL/GroES-depleted cells. They found that 34/85 of the Class III clients did not depend on GroEL/GroES for solubility (Class III clients), suggesting that the enrichment of a protein in GroEL/GroES complexes is correlated with, but does not exactly predict, obligate dependency. Combining the 49/85 (60%) of Class III clients that are dependent on GroEL/GroES for solubility with another eight proteins not previously included in Class III, these authors proposed a new class of obligate GroEL/GroES clients (Class IV). The results of our analyses are summarized in table 1, which shows the effect of chaperonin buffering on the evolution of each of these four groups of clients (all clients, Class III, Class IV, and Class III).

Table 1.

Main Effects in the ANCOVAs Evaluating Influences on Evolutionary Rate

Slope
Term All Clients Class III Clients (Kerner et al. 2005) Class IV Clients (Fujiwara et al. 2010) Class III Clients (Fujiwara et al. 2010)
Nonclient −2.561 × 10−2 (*) −1.512 × 10−1 (**) −4.623 × 10−1 (***) −2.183 × 10−2
Nonessential −5.872 × 10−2 (**) −6.043 × 10−2 −5.11 × 10−1 (***) 6.44 × 10−2
Residue contact density −1.024 × 10−2 (***) −2.075 × 10−2 (***) −3.68 × 10−2 (**) −1.449 × 10−2 (**)
Protein–protein interactions −3.604 × 10−3 (***) −1.178 × 10−2 (**) −4.865 × 10−2 (**) −5.445 × 10−3 (**)
Expression level −1.782 × 10−5 (***) −3.981 × 10−5 (**) −1.317 × 10−4 (***) 3.180 × 10−5 (**)
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Note.—Chaperonin buffering (nonclient), gene essentiality (nonessential), residue contact density, number of protein–protein interactions, and mRNA expression level. Clients are classified in three ways: all clients (all 252 GroEL/GroES interactors identified by Kerner et al. [2005]); the 84 obligate clients identified by the same authors on the basis that >4% of the cellular content of the protein was interacting with GroEL/GroES at a given time and the 57 proteins which become insoluble upon GroEL/GroES depletion in the experiments of Fujiwara et al. (2010). Significance levels: *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.0001. Full summaries of the analyses, including precise P values, are provided as supplementary material (Supplementary Material online).

Regardless of the way in which GroEL clients and nonclients are defined, our analysis recovers the well-documented negative correlations between expression levels, numbers of protein–protein interactions, residue contact density, and evolutionary rate (see table 1), with two exceptions. First, when the Class III proteins are compared with the rest of the proteome, the main effect of expression level changes sign, with higher expression levels associated with a moderate increase in evolutionary rate. Deletion of the client/nonclient term recovers the negative correlation between expression level and evolutionary rate observed with all other client/nonclient classifications, suggesting that this effect is due to the interaction between these two terms. Class III proteins are highly enriched in GroEL/GroES complexes but do not depend on the chaperonin for solubility. Fujiwara et al. (2010) noted that half of the Class III proteins bind RNA or DNA, and overall, the class is enriched for positively charged amino acids. On the basis of this evidence, they proposed that these proteins are frequently recovered from GroEL/GroES complexes because they can bind the negatively charged interior surface of the GroEL/GroES cavity, not because they required GroEL/GroES for folding—an hypothesis that is supported by the lack of any significant chaperonin buffering effect in this class (see below). The division of our data set into this group of proteins on the one hand and a mix of the “genuine” clients and nonclients on the other may have produced the interaction giving rise to the change in sign of the expression level main effect.

Secondly, we find that in two of our four analyses, essential genes are evolving faster than nonessential ones when these other factors are taken into account. To explore the reason for this unexpected result, we compared essential and nonessential genes in several ways. A simple comparison of mean evolutionary rate recovers a moderate but statistically significant reduction in rate in essential genes, as has previously been reported (mean Poisson distance in essential genes = 0.160, nonessential = 0.174, P < 10−15, Mann–Whitney U test); (Koonin 2005; Wolf et al. 2010). Essential genes participate in more protein–protein interactions (16.1 vs. 5.4, P < 10−15, Mann–Whitney U test) and have higher expression levels (2,500 vs. 1,239, P < 10−15, Mann–Whitney U test) than those that are nonessential, which may go some way to explaining why they are essential in the first place. To identify the factors underlying the effect of essentiality in our ANCOVAs, we reanalyzed the data while dropping each one of the other factors in turn. Failing to account for residue contact density or client/nonclient status resulted in no change in sign or significance of the essentiality term, but its significance was abolished when either of the terms modeling the number of protein–protein interactions or expression level were dropped. In comparison, dropping any one of the protein–protein interactions, expression levels, or essentiality from the ANCOVA neither changed the sign nor abolished the significance of the client/nonclient term (see supplementary table 13, Supplementary Material online).

The method used to classify GroEL clients had a striking effect on the analysis: considering both facultative and obligate clients together, there was a marginally significant effect of chaperonin buffering on evolutionary rate, with an increase in rate associated with clients—although, unlike the effects discussed below, the significance of this term was abolished when we reanalyzed a nonredundant subset of our data to test for biases arising from phylogenetic nonindependence (see Materials and Methods). We note, however, that this could also have resulted from the reduction in statistical power when decreasing the number of sequences in our analyses. When only Class III clients were considered, the significance and effect size of this rate shift was greatly increased (P = 0.00301) and became even more striking among Class IV clients which absolutely depend on GroEL/GroES for solubility (P < 10−15). The analysis suggested that once other factors are accounted for, these obligate clients show an increase in mean per-residue Poisson distance of 0.4263 relative to the rest of the gamma-proteobacterial proteome. As discussed above, there is no significant effect of chaperonin buffering when only Class III proteins are considered—that is, proteins enriched in GroEL/GroES complexes but that remain soluble in GroEL/GroES-depleted cells. These results lead to two conclusions: 1) at least among the gamma-proteobacteria, GroEL/GroES facilitates the accumulation of amino acid substitutions in its obligate clients but not in all proteins with which it regularly interacts and 2) this buffering effect is most pronounced in client proteins that depend on the GroEL/GroES system for solubility (Class IV clients), as opposed to all proteins which are highly enriched in GroEL/GroES complexes. This relationship is masked in simple comparisons of client and nonclient evolutionary rate due to the increased functional importance of clients. To identify the factors that most directly interfere with the buffering effect, we deleted individual factors from our Class IV ANCOVA and evaluated the effect upon the remaining terms (see fig. 1). This approach suggested that gene essentiality and the number of protein–protein interactions were the most important confounding factors.

Fig. 1.—

Fig. 1.—

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The relationships between chaperonin buffering, gene essentiality, protein–protein interactions, residue contact density, and expression levels. The effect of deleting each main term and its interactions on the remaining terms: the arrows point away from the term being deleted, with the width of the arrow proportional to the change in significance. Colors denote the direction of the change: blue indicates a decrease in the P value, whereas orange indicates an increase. The raw data used to generate this figure is provided in supplementary table 13 (Supplementary Material online). The effect of chaperonin buffering becomes less significant when numbers of protein–protein interactions and gene essentiality are taken into account, suggesting that these are the most important confounding factors in simple comparisons of client and nonclient evolutionary rate.

The increase in evolutionary rate that we observed among GroEL clients might be taken as evidence in favor of the “chaperonin-facilitated adaptation” model of Tokuriki and Tawfik (2009), but we note that this will only hold if mutations which confer new functions are disproportionately likely to interfere with protein folding—that is, to make folding intermediates more difficult to reach. If the effect of chaperonin-mediated buffering is simply to broaden the spectrum of neutral mutations in clients, then the ability of positive selection to promote the fixation of adaptive mutations will be weakened—that is, buffering will mainly act to increase the strength of genetic drift operating on clients. If, however, neofunctionalizing mutations tend to be destabilizing—a proposition for which there is some evidence (Wang et al. 2002; Tokuriki et al. 2008)—then buffering could maintain such variants in the population, making them accessible to positive selection if they confer an advantageous phenotype.

Neutral Evolution of GroEL Clients in Mycoplasmas?

Certain species of Mycoplasma and Ureaplasma are unique among sequenced genomes in lacking a chaperonin homolog of any kind (Lund 2009). Although these bacteria have experienced extensive genome reduction (Woese 1987), the loss of GroEL is surprising. GroEL is an essential gene in E. coli at least in part because several other essential proteins depend on it for proper folding (Lund 2009). Presumably, the loss of GroEL in Mycoplasmas must have been accompanied by either the loss of client homologs or the loss of their dependency on GroEL for folding. One possibility is that Mycoplasmas invest more in protein degradation in order to prevent aggregation (Wong and Houry 2004). However, there is now experimental evidence (Fujiwara et al. 2010) that at least some homologs of E. coli GroEL clients have lost their obligate chaperonin dependency in these bacteria, folding independently when expressed in E. coli. In the present study, our aim was to assess the effect of GroEL loss on the evolution of chaperonin clients in those Mycoplasmas that have lost GroEL. First, we used BlastP to identify homologs of E. coli clients in 11 complete Mycoplasma genomes and Ureaplasma, comprising 4 genomes that retain a copy of GroEL and 8 that have lost it. Perhaps surprisingly, there was no significant difference in the retention of obligate (Class III/IV) clients and nonclients in 9/12 of these genomes, and in the 3 genomes where the difference was significant (M. capricolum, M. mycoides, and M. synoviae), it reflected preferential retention of client proteins, even though these species have all lost GroEL (see table 2). How can the loss of GroEL have no effect, or even a positive effect, on the retention of obligate clients? A simple comparison of the numbers of retained clients and nonclients does not take into account other factors that might influence the loss of genes in Mycoplasmas. To account for these, we performed an ANCOVA that indicated that the heightened functional importance of client proteins (discussed above) plays some role in their retention in Mycoplasmas (table 2). In particular, proteins involved in higher numbers of interactions and essential proteins are significantly more likely to be retained in Mycoplasma genomes. Controlling for these covariates, client/nonclient status did not in itself have a significant effect on retention in any of the 12 genomes we analyzed, suggesting that the uncoupling of obligate client folding from GroEL reported in Ureaplasma may also apply in the related Mycoplasmas.

Table 2.

Loss of GroEL Clients and Nonclients from Mycoplasma Genomes

Class IV Clients Nonclients P value (Chi-squared test) General Linearized Model Main Terms
Species Client/Nonclient Essentiality Protein–Protein Interactions Expression
Mycoplasma genitalium 8/57 424/4,087 0.3691 −2.655 × 10−1 1.289 (***) 3.737 × 10−2 (***) 1.017 × 10−4 (*)
M. penetrans 11 600 0.3288 −2.867 × 10−1 1.201 (***) 3.127 × 10−2 (***) 6.959 × 10−5
M. gallisepticum 10 465 0.1467 −1.812 × 10−1 1.352 (***) 3.828 × 10−2 (***) 9.936 × 10−5 (*)
M. pneumoniae 8 463 0.5226 −3.519 × 10−1 1.191 (***) 3.728 × 10−2 (***) 7.745 × 10−5
M. pulmonis 10 515 0.2652 7.775 × 10−1 3.723 × 10−1 4.373 × 10−2 (***) −4.452 × 10−5
M. capricolum 17 572 0.0006768 (**) 5.784 × 10−1 1.074 (***) 3.907 × 10−2 (***) 9.791 × 10−5 (*)
M. mycoides 17 581 0.0008672 (**) 5.535 × 10−1 9.998 × 10−1 (***) 3.622 × 10−2 (***) 1.026 × 10−4 (**)
M. mobile 11 483 0.07522 −3.995 × 10−2 1.226 (***) 3.745 × 10−2 (***) 1.148 × 10−4 (0.00434)
M. arthriditis 8 410 0.3189 −7.284 × 10−1 7.322 × 10−1 (*) 5.05 × 10−2 (***) 5.498 × 10−5
M. hyopneumoniae 10 476 0.1694 1.187 4.190 × 10−1 4.258 × 10−2 (***) −5.908 × 10−5
M. synoviae 13 452 0.00526 (**) 2.004 9.391 × 10−1 (**) 4.145 × 10−2 (***) 1.802 × 10−5
Ureaplasma urealyticum 10 415 0.0678 1.581 × 10−1 1.321 (***) 4.315 × 10−2 (***) 6.825 × 10−5
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Note.—The chi-square P value reported is for a test of association between retention in Mycoplasma genomes and client/nonclient status in Escherichia coli. Proteins that are essential or involved in a high number of interactions are preferentially retained in Mycoplasma genomes, with higher mRNA expression levels in E. coli also being associated with retention in some cases. Client/nonclient status has no significant effect on retention in any species. Significance levels: *P < 0.05; **P < 0.01; ***P < 0.0001. The numbers reported here are for the Class IV clients of Fujiwara et al. (2010), but the results are qualitatively similar for Class III clients (see supplementary material, Supplementary Material online).

Did the loss of GroEL dependency in client proteins occur before or after the loss of GroEL in Mycoplasmas? Although the two events might be expected to be coupled, there is evidence that GroEL is not essential in M. genitalium and M. pneumoniae (Hutchison et al. 1999; Wong and Houry 2004), two of the four species that still possess the chaperonin. We addressed this question from an evolutionary perspective, asking whether the loss of GroEL had an effect on the nonsynonymous-to-synonymous substitution ratio (dN/dS) in GroEL-lacking Mycoplasmas. Our set of Mycoplasma homologs of E. coli GroEL clients contained 57 proteins, which we used to build 100 bootstrapped, maximum likelihood phylogenetic trees. Interestingly, 49/57 of these unrooted trees had a topology in which the Mycoplasmas with GroEL were separated from those without GroEL, the most parsimonious interpretation of such an arrangement being a single loss of GroEL within the Mycoplasmas (see fig. 2).

If former GroEL clients have accumulated mutations that enable them to fold independently, then this process might be detectable as an elevated dN/dS ratio among client proteins in the Mycoplasmas that lack GroEL. We tested this hypothesis using maximum likelihood estimates of dN/dS calculated using codeml (Yang 2007) on the consensus tree obtained from our client phylogenies. In order to increase the size of our data set, we considered any E. coli homolog, client, or nonclient, if it was present in at least 3/4 of the Mycoplasma genomes with GroEL and 6/7 without. Twenty-eight of fifty-seven client homologs and 100/282 nonclient homologs experienced significantly relaxed selective constraints in the Mycoplasma without GroEL (i.e., a two-dN/dS model, with a higher value on the branches without GroEL, was a significantly better fit to the data), but the difference in these proportions did not attain statistical significance (P = 0.0522, χ2 test). Although this P value exceeds the standard alpha value, we suggest that the analysis provides weak support for the idea of increased dN/dS in the client proteins of Mycoplasma that have lost GroEL, which might represent an evolutionary signature of adaptation to a GroEL-independent folding pathway. A plausible alternative explanation, however, is simply that GroEL-lacking Mycoplasmas experience a higher rate of genetic drift, which is supported by the remarkable observation that of all nonclient genes for which the two-ratio model fit better than the one-ratio, 100 showed a higher dN/dS on the GroEL-lacking branches versus only 4 in the GroEL-possessing Mycoplasmas. Additional support for this neutral explanation comes from comparisons of amino acid composition and molecular weight between client homologs in Mycoplasmas with or without GroEL. Fujiwara et al. (2010) reported an enrichment of alanine and glycine residues in Class IV (obligate) clients versus the rest of the E. coli proteome, suggesting that this property might distinguish independently folding from chaperonin-buffered proteins. Such a biasa, if also present in the client homologs of GroEL possessing but not GroEL-lacking Mycoplasmas, would provide additional evidence for the acquisition of independent folding exclusively in GroEL-lacking Mycoplasmas. A comparison of amino acid frequencies in the client homologs of these two sets of genomes, however, revealed no such pattern. Although we did detect significant differences in the frequencies of certain amino acids (see supplementary table 15, Supplementary Material online), there was no systematic bias in the biochemical properties of those amino acids enriched in one group or the other: for instance, valine was enriched in the clients of GroEL-possessing Mycoplasmas, whereas isoleucine was enriched in those of GroEL-lacking species. We also compared the molecular weights of client homologs between the two sets of Mycoplasma genomes, with the idea that the acquisition of independent folding might lead to increases in the mass of proteins no longer constrained by the volume of the GroEL protein folding cavity. This test also allowed us to determine whether small changes in the frequencies of multiple amino acids in Mycoplasmas client homologs might have added up to a significant change in mass, with potential implications for the interaction of the proteins with GroEL. However, we failed to detect a significant difference (P = 0.7771, Wilcoxon two-sampled paired signed rank test).

Taken together, these results suggest that the folding of E. coli client homologs has become uncoupled from GroEL in the Mycoplasmas, perhaps even in the species that have retained GroEL. Our conclusions are in agreement with those of Clark and Tillier (2010), who recently reported no differences in the folding properties of Mycoplasma client and nonclient homologs as predicted by the FoldIndex program (Prilusky et al. 2005). We also note that the results presented here do not exclude the possibility that GroEL clients in E. coli acquired chaperonin dependency after the divergence of the E. coli and Mycoplasma lineages: in this case, the equal retention of client and nonclient homologs in Mycoplasma genomes would not reflect the gain of independent folding in former clients but rather the retention of the ancestral state.

Conclusions

Although the models of chaperone-facilitated adaptive change proposed by Rutherford and Lindquist (1998) and Tokuriki and Tawfik (2009) suggest that chaperone clients should evolve faster than nonclients, the opposite is observed in the case of the E. coli chaperonin clients and their homologs. Here, we have shown that this pattern is due to the increased functional importance of clients and that once this is accounted for, client proteins are evolving faster than nonclients. As discussed above, our results support the hypothesis that chaperones facilitate adaptive evolution under the condition that functionally innovative mutations tend to interfere with protein folding. But why do clients tend to be more functionally important? We propose two hypotheses based on the observation of increased evolutionary rates in clients. First, proteins that are buffered by chaperones might be able to more easily fix functionally innovative mutations despite their structurally destabilizing effects. The acquisition of new functions by these proteins would then lead them to take on a more important role in the cell. Alternatively, proteins that are already performing important functions are highly constrained and therefore might have more need of chaperone-assisted folding following the fixation of functionally innovative mutations. However, if there is no connection between functional innovation and structural stability, then the effect of chaperonin buffering observed here would act to increase the strength of genetic drift acting on clients.

Supplementary Material

Supplementary tables 1–15 are available at Genome Biology and Evolution online (http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/gbe/).

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a grant from Science Foundation Ireland (to M.A.F.) and a grant from the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (to T.A.W). We are grateful to Christina Toft for providing the gamma-proteobacterial data set for analysis and to Brian E. Caffrey for providing useful feedback on the manuscript.

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