DNA damage in germ cells induces an innate immune response that triggers systemic stress resistance.

DNA damage responses have been well characterized with regard to their cell-autonomous checkpoint functions leading to cell cycle arrest, senescence and apoptosis. In contrast, systemic responses to tissue-specific genome instability remain poorly understood. In adult Caenorhabditis elegans worms germ cells undergo mitotic and meiotic cell divisions, whereas somatic tissues are entirely post-mitotic. Consequently, DNA damage checkpoints function specifically in the germ line, whereas somatic tissues in adult C. elegans are highly radio-resistant. Some DNA repair systems such as global-genome nucleotide excision repair (GG-NER) remove lesions specifically in germ cells. Here we investigated how genome instability in germ cells affects somatic tissues in C. elegans. We show that exogenous and endogenous DNA damage in germ cells evokes elevated resistance to heat and oxidative stress. The somatic stress resistance is mediated by the ERK MAP kinase MPK-1 in germ cells that triggers the induction of putative secreted peptides associated with innate immunity. The innate immune response leads to activation of the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) in somatic tissues, which confers enhanced proteostasis and systemic stress resistance. We propose that elevated systemic stress resistance promotes endurance of somatic tissues to allow delay of progeny production when germ cells are genomically compromised.

Neural sirtuin 6 (Sirt6) ablation attenuates somatic growth and causes obesity.

In yeast, Sir2 family proteins (sirtuins) regulate gene silencing, recombination, DNA repair, and aging via histone deacetylation. Most of the seven mammalian sirtuins (Sirt1-Sirt7) have been implicated as NAD(+)-dependent protein deacetylases with targets ranging from transcriptional regulators to metabolic enzymes. We report that neural-specific deletion of sirtuin 6 (Sirt6) in mice leads to postnatal growth retardation due to somatotropic attenuation through low growth hormone (GH) and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1) levels. However, unlike Sirt6 null mice, neural Sirt6-deleted mice do not die from hypoglycemia. Instead, over time, neural Sirt6-deleted mice reach normal size and ultimately become obese. Molecularly, Sirt6 deletion results in striking hyperacetylation of histone H3 lysine 9 (H3K9) and lysine 56 (H3K56), two chromatin marks implicated in the regulation of gene activity and chromatin structure, in various brain regions including those involved in neuroendocrine regulation. On the basis of these findings, we propose that Sirt6 functions as a central regulator of somatic growth and plays an important role in preventing obesity by modulating neural chromatin structure and gene activity.

DAF-16/FOXO and EGL-27/GATA promote developmental growth in response to persistent somatic DNA damage.

Genome maintenance defects cause complex disease phenotypes characterized by developmental failure, cancer susceptibility and premature ageing. It remains poorly understood how DNA damage responses function during organismal development and maintain tissue functionality when DNA damage accumulates with ageing. Here we show that the FOXO transcription factor DAF-16 is activated in response to DNA damage during development, whereas the DNA damage responsiveness of DAF-16 declines with ageing. We find that in contrast to its established role in mediating starvation arrest, DAF-16 alleviates DNA-damage-induced developmental arrest and even in the absence of DNA repair promotes developmental growth and enhances somatic tissue functionality. We demonstrate that the GATA transcription factor EGL-27 co-regulates DAF-16 target genes in response to DNA damage and together with DAF-16 promotes developmental growth. We propose that EGL-27/GATA activity specifies DAF-16-mediated DNA damage responses to enable developmental progression and to prolong tissue functioning when DNA damage persists.