UC San Diego

When yeast cells endure environmental changes, they respond transcriptionally and translationally causing a fluctuation of gene expression dependent on the environmental changes. Understanding how yeast cells molecularly respond to environmental changes can give us insight into certain molecular mechanisms that contribute to cellular responses. We investigated how yeast cells molecularly respond during a 5-day growth period in which they will endure glucose deprivation causing metabolization of ethanol that produces a diauxic shift resulting in respiratory growth, before the cells reach stationary phase. During the growth period, yeast develop stress granules during respiratory growth. The functions of stress granules are not known but are indicated to have a role in gene regulation during environment changes. Ded1 is an RNA helicase important for translation initiation that is a contributing factor to the assembly and disassembly of stress granules by co-localizing to them. A recently discovery found deleting Ado1 completely disrupts co-localization of Ded1 to stress granules. Giving us the opportunity to use the disruption to understand how yeast cells endure the 5-day growth period but also attempt to discover a possible function for stress granules.