External and internal triggers of cell death in yeast

Abstract

In recent years, yeast was confirmed as a useful eukaryotic model system to decipher the complex mechanisms and networks occurring in higher eukaryotes, particularly in mammalian cells, in physiological as well in pathological conditions. This article focuses attention on the contribution of yeast in the study of a very complex scenario, because of the number and interconnection of pathways, represented by cell death. Yeast, although it is a unicellular organism, possesses the basal machinery of different kinds of cell death occurring in higher eukaryotes, i.e., apoptosis, regulated necrosis and autophagy. Here we report the current knowledge concerning the yeast orthologs of main mammalian cell death regulators and executors, the role of organelles and compartments, and the cellular phenotypes observed in the different forms of cell death in response to external and internal triggers. Thanks to the ease of genetic manipulation of this microorganism, yeast strains expressing human genes that promote or counteract cell death, onset of tumors and neurodegenerative diseases have been constructed. The effects on yeast cells of some of these genes are also presented.

Keywords: Apoptosis; Autophagy; Caspase; Necrosis; Yeast.

Fig. 1

Regulated cell death (RCD) scenarios in yeast at glance. Apoptotic-like and necrotic RCD are represented in red and black, respectively. External triggers, included in boxes shading from red to black, induce apoptotic (red) or necrotic (black) RCD depending on their concentration