SUMO protease and proteasome recruitment at the nuclear periphery differently affect replication dynamics at arrested forks.
Nuclear pores complexes (NPCs) are genome organizers, defining a particular nuclear compartment enriched for SUMO protease and proteasome activities, and act as docking sites for DNA repair. In fission yeast, the anchorage of perturbed replication forks to NPCs is an integral part of the recombination-dependent replication restart mechanism (RDR) that resumes DNA synthesis at terminally dysfunctional forks. By mapping DNA polymerase usage, we report that SUMO protease Ulp1-associated NPCs ensure efficient initiation of restarted DNA synthesis, whereas proteasome-associated NPCs sustain the speed of restarted DNA polymerase. In contrast to Ulp1, this last function occurs independently of SUMO chains formation. By analyzing the role of the nuclear basket, the nucleoplasmic extension of the NPC, we reveal that the activities of Ulp1 and the proteasome cannot compensate for each other and affect the dynamics of RDR in distinct ways. Our work probes the mechanisms by which the NPC environment ensures optimal RDR. Overall design: We mapped ribonucleotide-incorporation by the mutated DNA polymerase delta and epsilon at single-nucleotide resolution and used the data for following the replication fork restart by subsequent informatics analysis.