Modulation of protein synthesis and degradation maintains proteostasis during yeast growth at different temperatures

Abstract

To understand how cells regulate each step in the flow of gene expression is one of the most fundamental goals in molecular biology. In this work, we have investigated several protein turnover-related steps in the context of gene expression regulation in response to changes in external temperature in model yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We have found that the regulation of protein homeostasis is stricter than mRNA homeostasis. Although global translation and protein degradation rates are found to increase with temperature, the increase of the catalytic activity of ribosomes is higher than the global translation rate suggesting that yeast cells adapt the amount of translational machinery to the constraints imposed by kinetics in order to minimize energy costs. Even though the transcriptional machinery is subjected to the same constraints, we observed interesting differences between transcription and translation, which may be related to the different energy costs of the two processes as well as the differential functions of mRNAs and proteins.

Keywords: Protein stability; Proteostasis; Ribostasis; Saccharomyces cerevisiae; Translation rate; Yeast.