The early signaling events involved in oxidant recognition and triggering of oxidant-specific defense mechanisms to counteract oxidative stress still remain largely elusive. Our discovery driven comparative proteomics analysis revealed unique early signaling response of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae on the proteome level to oxidants with a different mechanism of action as early as 3 min after treatment with four oxidants, namely H2O2, cumene hydroperoxide (CHP), and menadione and diamide, when protein abundances were compared using label-free quantification relying on a high-resolution mass analyzer (Orbitrap). We identified significant regulation of 196 proteins in response to H2O2, 569 proteins in response to CHP, 369 proteins in response to menadione and 207 proteins in response to diamide. Only 17 proteins were common across all treatments, but several more proteins were shared between two or three oxidants. Pathway analyses revealed that each oxidant triggered a unique signaling mechanism associated with cell survival and repair. Signaling pathways mostly regulated by oxidants were Ran, TOR, Rho, and eIF2. Furthermore, each oxidant regulated these pathways in a unique way indicating specificity of response to oxidants having different modes of action. We hypothesize that interplay of these signaling pathways may be important in recognizing different oxidants to trigger different downstream MAPK signaling cascades and to induce specific responses.
Keywords: MAPK cascade; RAN signaling; TOR signaling; antioxidants; global untargeted proteomics; oxidative stress; reactive oxygen species.