Reprogramming of nonfermentative metabolism by stress-responsive transcription factors in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae

The fundamental questions of how cells control growth and respond to stresses have captivated scientists for years. Despite the complexity of these cellular processes, we could approach this puzzle by asking our favorite model yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, how it makes a critical decision to either proliferate, to rest in a quiescent state or to program itself to die. This review highlights the essentiality of transcriptional factors in the reprogramming of gene expression as a prime mechanism of cellular stress responses. A whelm of evidence shows that transcriptional factors allow cells to acquire appropriate and unified responses to the transmitted signals. They function to modulate pathway-specific gene expression and organize transcriptomic responses to the altered environments. This review is aimed to summarize current knowledge on the roles of novel and well-known yeast transcription factors in the control of growth and stress responses during glucose deprivation as a prototypical case study. The scope includes stress sensing, transcription factors' identity, gene regulation and proposed crosstalks between pathways, associated with stress responses. A complex commander system of multiple stress-responsive transcription factors, observed here and elsewhere, indicates that regulation of glucose starvation/diauxic shift is a highly sophisticated and well-controlled process, involving elaborative networks of different kinase/target proteins. Using S. cerevisiae as a model, basic genetic research studies on gene identification have once again proved to be essential in the comprehension of molecular basis of cellular stress responses. Insights into this fundamental and highly conserved phenomenon will endow important prospective impacts on biotechnological applications and healthcare improvement.