👤 Jacob L McCauley

CNS diseases are a prevailing cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, and are influenced by environmental and biological factors, including genetic risk. Here, we generated genome-wide genetic data on a large cohort of brain tissue donors with in-depth clinical and neuropathological phenotyping, allowing for broad investigations into the risk and mechanisms of these neurological, neurodevelopmental, and psychiatric conditions. This resource consists of 9,663 donors with array-based genotyping and 9,543 donors with whole-genome sequencing completed. The clinical diagnoses of these donors include 148 central nervous system diseases clustered into 15 broad categories by International Classification of Diseases-10 (ICD-10) coding. These donors were collected by six repositories comprising the National Institutes of Health NeuroBioBank, with an average participant age of 60 years. While primarily older individuals of European descent, the cohort also contains younger donors and individuals from non-European backgrounds. Variants were detected in whole-genome sequencing (WGS), normalized and annotated to describe their functional impact, resulting in 171,121,209 unique variants and 1,078,774 non-silent variants. These raw and normalized data have been made available as a neurogenomics resource in the National Institute of Mental Health Data Archive (NIMH NDA) (nda.nih.gov), combined with donor-matched deep demographic and phenotypic data from the NeuroBioBank Portal (neurobiobank.nih.gov). To illustrate applications, we replicated the strong association observed in previous studies between pathogenic CAG nucleotide repeat expansions in the HTT gene with the clinical diagnosis of Huntington's disease, as well as associations of the APOE gene with Alzheimer's disease, and examined the association of polygenic risk scores with the three most common disease diagnoses in the cohort. Show less

The poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase enzyme Tankyrase-1 (TNKS) regulates multiple cellular processes and interacts with diverse proteins using five ankyrin repeat clusters (ARCs). There are limited structural insights into functional roles of the multiple ARCs of TNKS. Here we present the ARC1-3 crystal structure and employ small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) to investigate solution conformations of the complete ankyrin repeat domain. Mutagenesis and binding studies using the bivalent TNKS binding domain of Axin1 demonstrate that only certain ARC combinations function together. The physical basis for these restrictions is explained by both rigid and flexible ankyrin repeat elements determined in our structural analysis. SAXS analysis is consistent with a dynamic ensemble of TNKS ankyrin repeat conformations modulated by Axin1 interaction. TNKS ankyrin repeat domain is thus an adaptable binding platform with structural features that can explain selectivity toward diverse proteins, and has implications for TNKS positioning of bound targets for poly(ADP-ribose) modification. Show less

Tankyrase-1 (TNKS1/PARP-5a) is a poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) enzyme that regulates multiple cellular processes creating a poly(ADP-ribose) posttranslational modification that can lead to target protein turnover. TNKS1 thereby controls protein levels of key components of signaling pathways, including Axin1, the limiting component of the destruction complex in canonical Wnt signaling that degrades β-catenin to prevent its coactivator function in gene expression. There are limited molecular level insights into TNKS1 regulation in cell signaling pathways. TNKS1 has a sterile α motif (SAM) domain that is known to mediate polymerization, but the functional requirement for SAM polymerization has not been assessed. We have determined the crystal structure of wild-type human TNKS1 SAM domain and used structure-based mutagenesis to disrupt polymer formation and assess the consequences on TNKS1 regulation of β-catenin-dependent transcription. Our data indicate the SAM polymer is critical for TNKS1 catalytic activity and allows TNKS1 to efficiently access cytoplasmic signaling complexes. Show less