Laboratoire Matière et Systèmes Complexes

Thèse de Zacchari Ben Meriem effectuée sous la direction de Prénom Nom et Emmanuelle Fabre.

Date : le lundi 26 novembre 2018 à 14h30.

Lieu : bâtiment Condorcet, Amphithéâtre Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (PGG, niveau -1).

La soutenance sera suivie d’un pot au 6e étage.

Memory of Stress Response in S. cerevisiae

Abstract :

Cellular memory is a critical ability displayed by micro-organisms in order to adapt to potentially detrimental environmental fluctuations. In the unicellular eukaryote S. cerevisiae, it has been shown at the population level that cellular memory can take the form of a faster or a decreased response following repeated stresses.

We here present a study on how yeasts respond to short, pulsed hyperosmotic stresses at the single-cell level. We analyzed the dynamical behavior of the stress responsive STL1 promoter fused to a fluorescent reporter using microfluidics and fluorescence time-lapse microscopy.

We established that pSTL1 displays a dynamical variability in its successive activations following two short and repeated stresses. Despite this variability, most cells displayed a memory of past stresses through a decreased activity of pSTL1 upon repeated stresses. We showed that this memory does not require do novo protein synthesis. Rather, the genomic location is important for the memory since promoter displacement to a pericentromeric chromatin domain leads to its decreased transcriptional strength and to the loss of the memory. Interestingly, our results points towards an unreported involvement of the SIR complex on the activity of pSTL1 only when displaced to the pericentromeric domain in our experimental conditions.

This study provides a quantitative description of a cellular memory that includes single-cell variability and points towards the contribution of the chromatin structure in stress memory. Our work could serve as a basis to broader studies on the positioning of stress response genes at subtelomeric positions in the budding yeast, from a genetic point of view as well as an evolutionary one.