Genomic characterization of POS5, the Saccharomyces cerevisiae mitochondrial NADH kinase

Disruption of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae mitochondrial NADH kinase POS5 increases the mitochondrial mutation rate 50-fold. Whereas most multicellular eukaryotic genomes have one NADH kinase gene, the yeast genome contains three distinct genes encoding NAD/H kinase activity. To determine if all three genes are essential for viability we constructed combinations of gene knockouts. We show that only the pos5Δutr1Δ combination is synthetically lethal, demonstrating an essential overlapping function, and showing that NAD/H kinase activity is essential for eukaryotic viability. The single human NAD/H kinase gene can rescue the lethality of the double knockout in yeast, demonstrating that the single human gene can fill the various functions provided by the three yeast genes. The human NAD/H kinase gene harbors very common sequence variants, but all of these equally complement the synthetic lethality in yeast, illustrating that each of these are functionally wild-type. To understand the molecular mechanism of the mitochondrial genome instability of pos5 mutation we performed gene expression analysis on the pos5Δ. The pos5Δ resulted in an increase in expression of most of the iron transport genes including key genes involved in iron–sulfur cluster assembly. Decreased expression occurred in many genes involved in the electron transport chain. We show that the pos5Δ expression pattern is similar to the frataxin homolog knockout (yfh1Δ), the yeast model for Friedreich's ataxia. These combined data show that the POS5 NAD/H kinase is an important protein required for a variety of essential cellular pathways and that deficient iron–sulfur cluster assembly may play a critical role in the mitochondrial mutator phenotype observed in the pos5Δ.