Cohesin sumoylation is required for repression of subtelomeric gene expression in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Cohesin is an evolutionary conserved protein complex first described for its role in sister chromatid cohesion, that impacts several chromosomal processes. The functions of budding yeast cohesin in chromosome segregation, replication and repair are regulated by its post-translational processing and modifications. Cohesin associates with centromeres, pericentric regions and discrete sites along chromosome arms till the end. Near chromosome ends, telomeres exist in a heterochromatin-like configuration and exert SIR-complex mediated telomere position effect resulting in repression of sub-telomeric gene transcription. Previously, we reported that cohesin has a SIR-independent role in subtelomeric gene silencing (Kothiwal and Laloraya, 2019). Here, we investigated the requirement of cohesin sumoylation in subtelomeric repression. We created a sumoylation-deficient cohesin complex by fusing the catalytic domain of a SUMO protease, ULP1, to the C-terminus of Mcd1/Scc1 (Mcd1-UD), a cohesin subunit. We show that cohesin sumoylation is required for repression of sub-telomeric genes. In agreement with our earlier observations of a SIR-independent role of cohesin in telomere silencing, SIR-proteins remained bound to a de-repressed subtelomeric gene in MCD1-UD and its expression further increased upon deletion of SIR2 . Interestingly, we did not observe a cohesion defect in this mutant suggesting that sister chromatid cohesion and regulation of sub-telomere gene silencing are separable functions of cohesin. Telomere tethering to the nuclear envelope and telomere compaction are defective in MCD1-UD, indicating that sumoylation contributes to cohesin’s role in subtelomeric chromosome organization. Our data establish the relevance of cohesin sumoylation in subtelomeric repression, a function independent of cohesin’s role in sister chromatid cohesion.