A sensory illusion that makes yeast cells self-destruct

A possible tactic for cancer therapeutics
November 20, 2015

Effects of osmotic changes on yeast cell growth. (A) Schematic of the flow chamber used to create osmotic level oscillations for different periods of time. (B) Cell growth for these periods. The graphs show the average number of progeny cells (blue) before and after applying stress for different periods (gray shows orginal “no stress” line). The inset shows representative images of cells for two periods. (credit: Amir Mitchell et al./Science)

UC San Francisco researchers have discovered that even brainless single-celled yeast have “sensory biases” that can be hacked by a carefully engineered illusion — a finding that could be used to develop new approaches to fighting diseases such as cancer.

In the new study, published online Thursday November 19 in Science Express, Wendell Lim, PhD, the study’s senior author*, and his team discovered that yeast cells falsely perceive a pattern of osmotic levels (by applying potassium chloride) that alternate in eight minute intervals as massive, continuously increasing stress. In response, the microbes over-respond and kill themselves. (In their natural environment, salt stress normally gradually increases.)

The results, Lim says, suggest a whole new way of looking at the perceptual abilities of simple cells and this power of illusion could even be used to develop new approaches to fighting cancer and other diseases.

“Our results may also be relevant for cellular signaling in disease, as mutations affecting cellular signaling are common in cancer, autoimmune disease, and diabetes,” the researchers conclude in the paper. “These mutations may rewire the native network, and thus could modify its activation and adaptation dynamics. Such network rewiring in disease may lead to changes that can be most clearly revealed by simulation with oscillatory inputs or other ‘non-natural’ patterns.

“The changes in network response behaviors could be exploited for diagnosis and functional profiling of disease cells, or potentially taken advantage of as an Achilles’ heel to selectively target cells bearing the diseased network.”


UC San Francisco (UCSF) | Sensory Illusion Causes Cells to Self-Destruct

* Chair of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at UCSF, director of the UCSF Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator.

** Normally, sensor molecules in a yeast cell detect changes in salt concentration and instruct the cell to respond by producing a protective chemical. The researchers found that the cells were perfectly capable of adapting when they flipped the salt stress on and off every minute or every 32 minutes. But to their surprise, when they tried an eight-minute oscillation of precisely the same salt level the cells quickly stopped growing and began to die off.


Abstract of Oscillatory stress stimulation uncovers an Achilles’ heel of the yeast MAPK signaling network

Cells must interpret environmental information that often changes over time. We systematically monitored growth of yeast cells under various frequencies of oscillating osmotic stress. Growth was severely inhibited at a particular resonance frequency, at which cells show hyperactivated transcriptional stress responses. This behavior represents a sensory misperception—the cells incorrectly interpret oscillations as a staircase of ever-increasing osmolarity. The misperception results from the capacity of the osmolarity-sensing kinase network to retrigger with sequential osmotic stresses. Although this feature is critical for coping with natural challenges—like continually increasing osmolarity—it results in a tradeoff of fragility to non-natural oscillatory inputs that match the retriggering time. These findings demonstrate the value of non-natural dynamic perturbations in exposing hidden sensitivities of cellular regulatory networks.