Stress testing reveals selective vulnerabilities in protein homeostasis

Despite intensive study for decades, functional redundancies in the system obscure the contributions of the collectively important individual genes. Here, we leverage transposon sequencing across bacteria strains lacking key chaperones and proteases to reveal hidden determinants of stress response in protein homeostasis.

By profiling fitness under multiple proteotoxic stresses, we uncover stress-specific vulnerabilities and reveal how major players of PQC mask correlations between transcriptomic responses and gene fitness. As an illustration of unexpected connections, we identify a heat-specific synthetic lethality between the disaggregase ClpB and DNA Polymerase I (PolA) mediated by persistent aggregation of the RecA recombinase and toxic persistence of the heat shock regulon.