Unusual Occurrence of Two Bona-Fide CCA-Adding Enzymes in <i>Dictyostelium discoideum</i>

oleh: Lieselotte Erber, Anne Hoffmann, Jörg Fallmann, Monica Hagedorn, Christian Hammann, Peter F. Stadler, Heike Betat, Sonja Prohaska, Mario Mörl

Format: Article
Diterbitkan: MDPI AG 2020-07-01

Deskripsi

<i>Dictyostelium discoideum</i>, the model organism for the evolutionary supergroup of Amoebozoa, is a social amoeba that, upon starvation, undergoes transition from a unicellular to a multicellular organism. In its genome, we identified two genes encoding for tRNA nucleotidyltransferases. Such pairs of tRNA nucleotidyltransferases usually represent collaborating partial activities catalyzing CC- and A-addition to the tRNA 3′-end, respectively. In <i>D. discoideum</i>, however, both enzymes exhibit identical activities, representing bona-fide CCA-adding enzymes. Detailed characterization of the corresponding activities revealed that both enzymes seem to be essential and are regulated inversely during different developmental stages of <i>D. discoideum</i>. Intriguingly, this is the first description of two functionally equivalent CCA-adding enzymes using the same set of tRNAs and showing a similar distribution within the cell. This situation seems to be a common feature in Dictyostelia, as other members of this phylum carry similar pairs of tRNA nucleotidyltransferase genes in their genome.