The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary

The summary of the selected article appears at the bottom of the page. In order to get back to the contents of the issue this article belongs to you have to access the link from the title. In order to see all the articles of the archive which have as author/co-author one of the authors mentioned below, you have to access the link from the author's name.

 
       
         
    STUDIA BIOLOGIA - Issue no. 1 / 2019  
         
  Article:   ANALYSIS OF GENES THAT MEDIATE PERSISTENCE IN HALOPHILIC MICROBES SUBJECTED TO OSMOTIC SHOCK.

Authors:  MARGOT R. MIRANDA-KATZ, ABBY M. GREGORY, SERENA M. GRAHAM, RONALD F. PECK.
 
       
         
  Abstract:   All organisms are subject to stress from environmental changes, and understanding the specific molecular responses to allow cells to maintain viability is a fundamental biological problem. We explore this process in the halophilic microbe Haloferax volcanii. We hypothesize that they have evolved so that a subset of their population consists of cells prepared to survive dramatic stress events. As a first step to examine how these ‘persisting’ cells endure, we used RNA sequencing to examine transcriptome differences in cells that survived osmotic shock compared to unstressed cells. Our data revealed that approximately half of the protein-coding genes exhibited statistically significant differences in transcriptome abundance with a nearly equal distribution of more abundant and less abundant transcripts. There were about twice the number of transcripts exhibiting a 10-fold or greater decrease (5.3% of protein-coding genes) in abundance than those with the same magnitude of increased abundance (2.7% of protein-coding genes). These results may indicate that cells primed for survival reduce production of proteins required for active metabolism. We are currently conducting experiments to determine if deletion or overexpression of some of these genes affects susceptibility of H. volcanii to osmotic shock. Our work may provide insight into why some cells in a microbial population survive stress events despite being genetically identical to cells that are killed.

Keywords: gene regulation, heat shock proteins, universal stress proteins.
 
         
     
         
         
      Back to previous page