Project description:Saccharomyces cerevisiae is currently widely used as a model to study chronological aging of metazoan cells. Chronological aging is typically studied in aerobic stationary phase (SP) cultures, i.e. the final stage of batch cultures in which growth is arrested due to exogenous carbon source exhaustion. Survival of yeast cells in SP defines their chronological lifespan (CLS). S. cerevisiae SP cultures have strongly contributed to the understanding of cellular mechanisms involved in aging and indicated a key role for oxygen. Oxygen is the natural starting point for reactive oxygen species (ROS) that may both have malignant and beneficial effects on aging. In addition, oxygen allows yeast to grow on ethanol and organic acids formed during the initial respiro-fermentative growth phase on glucose. This post-diauxic phase is hallmarked by reduced growth rates, increased expression of genes involved in SP survival, and increased stress resistance. To date, the role of oxygen and respiration in aging has mostly been studied using respiratory deficient mutants, and respiration repressing agents. However, genetic or chemical interventions may result in unwanted side effects that influence survival in SP. We therefore followed a different approach to evaluate the impact of oxygen availability on yeast robustness in SP, i.e. its CLS and stress resistance, by using the capability of S. cerevisiae to grow under anaerobic conditions. A thorough physiological comparison of strictly anaerobic and aerobic SP cultures revealed that the presence of oxygen during growth and aging of S. cerevisiae strongly affects its energetic status, longevity and stress tolerance in a positive way. Combining the physiological data with genome-wide expression analysis revealed that the oxygen-dependent diauxic growth phase enabled the full induction of robustness in S. cerevisiae, and points to appropriate pre-conditioning of cells as a crucial factor to survive starvation. These findings highlight the importance of exogenous energy availability in the conditions leading to growth arrest, and bring new insight on the role of oxygen in the aging of eukaryotes. The goal of the present study is to evaluate the impact of oxygen availability on yeast longevity. More specifically, the questions addressed are whether the presence of a â??conditioningâ?? post-diauxic phase and the ability to utilize efficiently reserves, characteristics of aerobicity, affects yeast survival during stationary phase. To this end, S. cerevisiae was cultivated in well controlled bioreactors under the presence or absence of oxygen. S. cerevisiaeâ??s response to oxygen availability was monitored by an in-depth physiological analysis combined with genome wide expression analysis.

Project description:Background: Recent studies have demonstrated that antisense transcription is pervasive in budding yeasts and is conserved between Saccharomyces cerevisiae and S. paradoxus. While studies have examined antisense transcripts of S. cerevisiae for inverse transcription in stationary phase and stress conditions, there is a lack of comprehensive analysis of the conditional specific evolutionary characteristics of antisense transcription between yeasts. Here we attempt to decipher the evolutionary relationship of antisense transcription of S. cerevisiae and S. paradoxus cultured in mid log, early stationary phase, and heat shock conditions. Results: Massively parallel sequencing of sequence strand-specific cDNA library was performed from RNA isolated from S. cerevisiae and S. paradoxus cells at mid log, stationary phase and heat shock conditions. We performed this analysis using a stringent set of sense ORF transcripts and non-coding antisense transcripts that were expressed in all the three conditions, as well as in both species. We found the divergence of the condition specific anti-sense transcription levels is higher than that in condition specific sense transcription levels, suggesting that antisense transcription played a potential role in adapting to different conditions. Furthermore, 43% of sense-antisense pairs demonstrated inverse transcription in either stationary phase or heat shock conditions relative to the mid log conditions. In addition, a large part of sense-antisense pairs (67%), which demonstrated inverse transcription, were highly conserved between the two species. Our results were also concordant with known functional analyses from previous studies and with the evidence from mechanistic experiments of role of individual genes. Conclusions: This study provides a comprehensive picture of the role of antisense transcription mediating sense transcription in different conditions across yeast species. We can conclude from our findings that antisense regulation could act like an on-off switch on sense regulation in different conditions.

Project description:Saccharomyces cerevisiae is currently widely used as a model to study chronological aging of metazoan cells. Chronological aging is typically studied in aerobic stationary phase (SP) cultures, i.e. the final stage of batch cultures in which growth is arrested due to exogenous carbon source exhaustion. Survival of yeast cells in SP defines their chronological lifespan (CLS). S. cerevisiae SP cultures have strongly contributed to the understanding of cellular mechanisms involved in aging and indicated a key role for oxygen. Oxygen is the natural starting point for reactive oxygen species (ROS) that may both have malignant and beneficial effects on aging. In addition, oxygen allows yeast to grow on ethanol and organic acids formed during the initial respiro-fermentative growth phase on glucose. This post-diauxic phase is hallmarked by reduced growth rates, increased expression of genes involved in SP survival, and increased stress resistance. To date, the role of oxygen and respiration in aging has mostly been studied using respiratory deficient mutants, and respiration repressing agents. However, genetic or chemical interventions may result in unwanted side effects that influence survival in SP. We therefore followed a different approach to evaluate the impact of oxygen availability on yeast robustness in SP, i.e. its CLS and stress resistance, by using the capability of S. cerevisiae to grow under anaerobic conditions. A thorough physiological comparison of strictly anaerobic and aerobic SP cultures revealed that the presence of oxygen during growth and aging of S. cerevisiae strongly affects its energetic status, longevity and stress tolerance in a positive way. Combining the physiological data with genome-wide expression analysis revealed that the oxygen-dependent diauxic growth phase enabled the full induction of robustness in S. cerevisiae, and points to appropriate pre-conditioning of cells as a crucial factor to survive starvation. These findings highlight the importance of exogenous energy availability in the conditions leading to growth arrest, and bring new insight on the role of oxygen in the aging of eukaryotes.

Project description:Background: Recent studies have demonstrated that antisense transcription is pervasive in budding yeasts and is conserved between Saccharomyces cerevisiae and S. paradoxus. While studies have examined antisense transcripts of S. cerevisiae for inverse transcription in stationary phase and stress conditions, there is a lack of comprehensive analysis of the conditional specific evolutionary characteristics of antisense transcription between yeasts. Here we attempt to decipher the evolutionary relationship of antisense transcription of S. cerevisiae and S. paradoxus cultured in mid log, early stationary phase, and heat shock conditions. Results: Massively parallel sequencing of sequence strand-specific cDNA library was performed from RNA isolated from S. cerevisiae and S. paradoxus cells at mid log, stationary phase and heat shock conditions. We performed this analysis using a stringent set of sense ORF transcripts and non-coding antisense transcripts that were expressed in all the three conditions, as well as in both species. We found the divergence of the condition specific anti-sense transcription levels is higher than that in condition specific sense transcription levels, suggesting that antisense transcription played a potential role in adapting to different conditions. Furthermore, 43% of sense-antisense pairs demonstrated inverse transcription in either stationary phase or heat shock conditions relative to the mid log conditions. In addition, a large part of sense-antisense pairs (67%), which demonstrated inverse transcription, were highly conserved between the two species. Our results were also concordant with known functional analyses from previous studies and with the evidence from mechanistic experiments of role of individual genes. Conclusions: This study provides a comprehensive picture of the role of antisense transcription mediating sense transcription in different conditions across yeast species. We can conclude from our findings that antisense regulation could act like an on-off switch on sense regulation in different conditions. Transcriptomes of two yeast species under mid-log phase, early stationary phase, and after heat shock treatment were generated by Illumina HiSeq 2000 paired-end sequencing

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Saccharomyces cerevisiae

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