PUBLICATION HIGHLIGHT

How cells cope with stress

This publication highlight is part of the SBGrid/Meharry Medical College Communities Project, focused on science education and demonstrating how structural biology and preclinical science connect to medicine.

Stress is a vital response that allows life to persevere through non-ideal environments and situations. Fluctuations in temperature, increasing concentrations of deleterious chemicals, and UV light exposure are a few examples of triggers for stress. All living things must be able to sense, process, and rapidly respond to stress. However, the molecular mechanism for how cells respond to stress is still not fully understood. Current research has shown that during times of stress, certain mRNA molecules and proteins in the cell aggregate into self organized, phase separated condensates called stress granules. These stress granules slow down cellular function and help cells manage resources during high stress moments. Additional research has shown that the dynamics of protein refolding, caused by increases in temperature, can initiate stress granule formation. These findings provide more evidence that the formation of stress granules is an adaptation for stress maintenance, not a simple symptom of stress. SBGrid members Drs. Allan Drummond and Tobin Sosnick at the University of Chicago have shown in a recent Nature Communications publication that the stress granular response is not only ubiquitous in life, but highly conserved and tunable.

Drs. Drummond, Sosnick, and colleagues studied three different yeast species that are separated by 100 million years of evolutionary history and have very different environmental temperature conditions. Using transcriptomic and proteomic studies, it was found that all of the yeast cells used the same molecular machinery to respond to rapid changes in temperature. The ubiquitous nature of the machinery suggests that this adaptation is older than the species themselves and evolved over time to meet the needs of each individual species. While the machinery was the same the specific response was triggered at different temperatures for each yeast species, suggesting the machinery evolved to fit the need of the individual yeast. Taken together, this study provides an interesting observation on the age and ubiquitousness of the fundamental stress response pathway. It also could lay the foundation for understanding how this vital response evolved and is used in more complex organisms like plants and animals.

Read more at Nature Communications.

By Vida Robertson, Fisk University

Vida Storm Robertson is a Masters Student in Chemistry at Fisk University working in both solid state and solution based structural determination techniques. He plans on starting a PhD program in biophysics in the fall of 2024.