Functional study of the Hap4-like genes suggests that the key regulators of carbon metabolism HAP4 and oxidative stress response YAP1 in yeast diverged from a common ancestor.

The transcriptional regulator HAP4, induced by respiratory substrates, is involved in the balance between fermentation and respiration in S. cerevisiae. We identified putative orthologues of the Hap4 protein in all ascomycetes, based only on a conserved sixteen amino acid-long motif.

Analyzing the suppression of respiratory defects in the yeast model of human mitochondrial tRNA diseases.

The respiratory defects associated with mutations in human mitochondrial tRNA genes can be mimicked in yeast, which is the only organism easily amenable to mitochondrial transformation. This approach has shown that overexpression of several nuclear genes coding for factors involved in mitochondrial protein synthesis can alleviate the respiratory defects both in yeast and in human cells. The present paper analyzes in detail the effects of overexpressed yeast and human mitochondrial translation elongation factors EF-Tu.

Can yeast be used to study mitochondrial diseases? Biolistic tRNA mutants for the analysis of mechanisms and suppressors.

Base substitutions equivalent to those causing human pathologies have been introduced in yeast mitochondrial tRNA genes. These mutants can be utilized as flexible tools to investigate the molecular aspects of mitochondrial diseases and identify correcting genes. We show that for all studied tRNA mutations (including an homoplasmic one in tRNA(Val)) the severity of phenotypes follows the same trend in four different nuclear backgrounds.