Correction of point mutations at the endogenous locus of the mammalian dihydrofolate reductase gene using polypurine reverse hoogsteen hairpins

This work is focused on the study of Polypurine Reverse Hoogsteen (PPRH) hairpins and their ability as gene correction tools. The repair of a point mutation at its endogenous gene locus has been the focus of many researchers during the past decades by using various approaches such as gene replacement, gene augmentation therapy (GAT) and different repair oligonucleotides. Cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia and Tay-Sachs disease are some examples of the high number of disorders caused by a single-point mutation. In this work we present an alternative repair methodology using PPRH molecules, that although first developed in our laboratory as a gene-silencing tool, we hypothesized that they could also be applied as a gene correction tool. PPRHs are double-stranded DNA molecules formed by two antiparallel homopurine domains linked by a 5-thymidine loop, which form intramolecular reverse Hoogsteen bonds. PPRHs have been described to effectively bind to the dsDNA forming a triplex structure (Coma et al., 2005), and have been designed against either the template or the coding strand of the dsDNA (de Almagro et al., 2009, de Almagro et al., 2011a). Taking advantage of the ability of PPRHs to form a triplex structure with the pyrimidine strand of the dsDNA, in the present work we wanted to explore the ability of PPRHs to correct point mutations. First of all, we studied the in vitro conditions for PPRHs to bind to dsDNA and to maintain it in an open conformation by binding assays. Then, we designed different repair-PPRHs by adding to the PPRH core a repair tail complementary to the mutated region of the DNA except for the nucleotide to be corrected. These repair-PPRHs were used in mammalian cells to repair a point mutation in a dihydrofolate reductase (dhfr) plasmid. Finally, those results led us to further demonstrate the correction capability of repair-PPRHs in different mutant cell lines containing single point mutations in the endogenous dhfr gene. In addition, we developed improved Long-distance-repair¬PPRHs (LDR-PPRHs) to correct mutations that are very distant with respect to the DNA target where the PPRH core binds. Considering the possible high proportion of guanines in a PPRH sequence, an in vitro characterization of these molecules was carried out to study the effect of these guanines in the formation of secondary structures, such as G-quadruplex. The triplex conformation formed by repair-PPRHs with their pyrimidine target sequences was also studied even when repair-PPRHs folded in a G-quadruplex structure instead of a hairpin. As a second part of this thesis, we developed a new application of the electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA) technique, to demonstrate the binding between miRNAs and their target sequences. For over two decades, research in our laboratory has been focused on the pharmacogenomic study of methotrexate (MTX) resistance in cancer chemotherapy upon inhibition of DHFR. Beside gene amplification, our research group has shown that many genes are involved in this mechanism. In this direction, cellular genes and micro-RNAs such as miR-224 and its target genes SLC4A4, CDS2 and HSPC159 were identified to play an important role in the resistance to MTX in colon cancer cells (Mencia et al., 2011). For this reason, miR-224 was chosen to show in a direct and specific manner, its ability to bind to the SLC4A4 target gene, thus setting up the EMSA as a simple and useful method to validate the interaction between a miRNA and a specific mRNA target.