Quantitative operating principles of yeast metabolism during adaptation to heat stress

Abstract

Microorganisms evolved adaptive responses to survive stressful challenges in ever-changing environments. Understanding the relationships between the physiological/metabolic adjustments allowing cellular stress adaptation and gene expression changes being used by organisms to achieve such adjustments may significantly impact our ability to understand and/or guide evolution. Here, we studied those relationships during adaptation to various stress challenges in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, focusing on heat stress responses. We combined dozens of independent experiments measuring whole-genome gene expression changes during stress responses with a simplified kinetic model of central metabolism. We identified alternative quantitative ranges for a set of physiological variables in the model (production of ATP, trehalose, NADH, etc.) that are specific for adaptation to either heat stress or desiccation/rehydration. Our approach is scalable to other adaptive responses and could assist in developing biotechnological applications to manipulate cells for medical, biotechnological, or synthetic biology purposes.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration (609396). This work was partially funded by grants from the Spanish MINECO (BFU2008- 0196 and BFU2010-17704) and Generalitat de Catalunya (2009SGR809) and bridge grants from the Dean for Research (2014, 2017) and the Departament de Ciències Mèdiques Bàsiques (2014) of the University of Lleida.