Coordinate responses to alkaline pH stress in budding yeast

Microb Cell. 2015 May 22;2(6):182-196. doi: 10.15698/mic2015.06.205.

Abstract

Alkalinization of the medium represents a stress condition for the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to which this organism responds with profound remodeling of gene expression. This is the result of the modulation of a substantial number of signaling pathways whose participation in the alkaline response has been elucidated within the last ten years. These regulatory inputs involve not only the conserved Rim101/PacC pathway, but also the calcium-activated phosphatase calcineurin, the Wsc1-Pkc1-Slt2 MAP kinase, the Snf1 and PKA kinases and oxidative stress-response pathways. The uptake of many nutrients is perturbed by alkalinization of the environment and, consequently, an impact on phosphate, iron/copper and glucose homeostatic mechanisms can also be observed. The analysis of available data highlights cases in which diverse signaling pathways are integrated in the gene promoter to shape the appropriate response pattern. Thus, the expression of different genes sharing the same signaling network can be coordinated, allowing functional coupling of their gene products.

Keywords: PKA; S. cerevisiae; Snf1; calcineurin; transcriptomics.

Publication types

  • Review

Grants and funding

The authors wish to thank former members of the Yeast Molecular Biology research group, Raquel Serrano, Laia Viladevall, Amparo Ruiz, Maria Platara, Asier González and Carlos Casado, who made many relevant contributions to these studies. Thanks are also given to M.A. Peñalva for critical reading of part of the manuscript and to J. Clotet (Universitat Internacional de Catalunya) for the Pho4-GFP plasmid. Recent work in the authors’ laboratory was funded by grants EUI2009-04147 (ERA-NET SysMo2), BFU2011-30197-C3-01 and BFU2014-54591-C2-1-P (Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, Spain, and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER)), and Ajut 2014SGR-4 (Generalitat de Catalunya) to JA. J.A. was the recipient of an Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA) Academia 2009 Award (Generalitat de Catalunya). D.C. was recipient of a pre-doctoral fellowship (FPU) from the Spanish Ministry of Education. A.S-C. was recipient of a PIF Fellowship (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona).