Deciphering the interstrand crosslink DNA repair network expressed by Trypanosoma brucei

Interstrand crosslinks (ICLs) represent a highly toxic form of DNA damage that can block essential biological processes including DNA replication and transcription. To combat their deleterious effects all eukaryotes have developed cell cycle-dependent repair strategies that co-opt various factors from 'classical' DNA repair pathways to resolve such lesions. Here, we report the first systematic dissection of how ICL repair might operate in the Trypanosoma brucei, the causative agent of African trypanosomiasis, and demonstrated that this diverged eukaryote expresses systems that show some intriguing differences to those mechanisms present in other organisms. Following the identification of trypanosomal homologues encoding for CSB, EXO1, SNM1, MRE11, RAD51 and BRCA2, gene deletion coupled with phenotypic studies demonstrated that all the above factors contribute to this pathogen's ICL REPAIRtoire with their activities split across two epistatic groups. We postulate that one network, which encompasses TbCSB, TbEXO1 and TbSNM1, may operate throughout the cell cycle to repair ICLs encountered by transcriptional detection mechanisms while the other relies on homologous recombination enzymes (MRE11, RAD51 and BRCA2) that together help resolve lesions responsible for the stalling of DNA replication forks. This study not only sheds light on the conservation and divergence of ICL repair in one of only a handful of protists that can be studied genetically, but offers the promise of developing or exploiting ICL-causing agents as new anti-parasite therapies.