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Tryptophan biosynthesis is important for resistance to replicative stress in Saccharomyces cerevisiae
Author(s) -
Godin Stephen K.,
Lee Alison G.,
Baird Jared M.,
Herken Benjamin W.,
Bernstein Kara A.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
yeast
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.923
H-Index - 102
eISSN - 1097-0061
pISSN - 0749-503X
DOI - 10.1002/yea.3150
Subject(s) - biology , saccharomyces cerevisiae , tryptophan , dna repair , auxotrophy , dna damage , dna , budding , yeast , biochemistry , genetics , microbiology and biotechnology , gene , amino acid , mutant
Abstract Acute tryptophan depletion is used to induce low levels of serotonin in the brain. This method has been widely used in psychiatric studies to evaluate the effect of low levels of serotonin, and is generally considered a safe and reversible procedure. Here we use the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to study the effects of tryptophan depletion on growth rate upon exposure to DNA‐damaging agents. Surprisingly, we found that budding yeast undergoing tryptophan depletion were more sensitive to DNA‐damaging agents such as methyl methanesulphonate (MMS) and hydroxyurea (HU). We found that this defect was independent of several DNA repair pathways, such as homologous recombination, base excision repair and translesion synthesis, and that this damage sensitivity was not due to impaired S‐phase signalling. Upon further analysis, we found that the DNA‐damage sensitivity of tryptophan depletion was likely due to impaired protein synthesis. These studies describe an important source of variance in budding yeast when using tryptophan as an auxotrophic marker, particularly on studies focusing on DNA repair, and suggest that further testing of the effect of tryptophan depletion on DNA repair in mammalian cells is warranted. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.