MutSα deficiency increases tolerance to DNA damage in yeast lacking postreplication repair

By combining mutations in DNA repair genes, important and unexpected interactions between different repair pathways can be discovered. In this study, we identified a novel link between mismatch repair (MMR) genes and postreplication repair (PRR) in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Strains lacking Rad5 (HLTF in mammals), a protein important for restarting stalled replication forks in the error-free PRR pathway, were supersensitive to the DNA methylating agent methyl methanesulfonate (MMS). Deletion of the mismatch repair genes, MSH2 or MSH6, which together constitutes the MutSα complex, partially suppressed the MMS super-sensitivity of the rad5Δ strain. Deletion of MSH2 also suppressed the MMS sensitivity of mms2Δ, which acts together with Rad5 in error-free PRR. However, inactivating the mismatch repair genes MSH3 and MLH1 did not suppress rad5Δ, showing that the suppression was specific for disabling MutSα. The partial suppression did not require translesion DNA synthesis (REV1, REV3 or RAD30), base excision repair (MAG1) or homologous recombination (RAD51). Instead, the underlying mechanism was dependent on RAD52 while independent of established pathways involving RAD52, like single-strand annealing and break-induced replication. We propose a Rad5- and Rad51-independent template switch pathway, capable of compensating for the loss of the error-free template-switch subpathway of postreplication repair, triggered by the loss of MutSα.