Isolation of genes affecting on DNA damag-induced life span shortening in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

초록

Environmental DNA damaging agents are toxic to the cell and cause wide-ranging cellular response including cell cycle alteration, metabolic changes, mutations and even cell death. Cells actively protect themselves from the damaging agents by eliminating toxic chemicals and recover from damage by repairing damaged cellular components including damaged DNA. Recently, we showed that DNA repair genes defects cause life span shortening in yeast. In order to identify the new genes that affect on yeast life span in the presence of DNA damage, we attempted to isolate genes that increase or decrease sensitivity to MMS, a DNA damaging agent, using yeast insertional deletion library. Several genes that were previously known to be un-related to MMS sensitivity were identified to increase or decrease MMS sensitivity. Currently, we are confirming the effect of each gene on MMS sensitivity and life span by characterization of targeted-gene deletion mutants of the isolated genes.