Loss of amyloid disaggregases during the evolution of Metazoa
Albert Erives, Jan Fassler
(Submitted on 15 Jan 2013)

In yeast, phenotypic adaptations can evolve by natural selection of conformational variant prions and their variant amyloid fibers. This system requires the Hsp104 disaggregase, which fragments amyloid fibers into smaller seed prions that are passed on to mitotic descendants and meiotic spores. Interestingly, Hsp104 is found in diverse eukaryotes except metazoans. To investigate whether a prion-based transmission “genetics” was incompatible with the evolution of Metazoa, we identify genes conserved in fungi and choanoflagellates but lost in animals. We show that both eukaryotic clpB amyloid disaggregases, HSP104 and its nuclear-encoded mitochondrial endo-ortholog HSP78, were lost in the stem-metazoan lineage along with only a small number of other relevant genes. We show that these gene losses are not unrelated historical accidents because these loci comprise a very small regulon devoted to prion transmission in yeast. We propose that evolution of developmental asymmetric cell-specifications necessitated the evolutionary deprecation of the ancient clpB system.