The Yeast Cells Shift from Anaerobic Respiration to Aerobic Respiration - Essay Example

The paper 'The Yeast Cells Shift from Anaerobic Respiration to Aerobic Respiration" is a perfect example of genetics research.
Some researchers used DNA microarrays or biochips or DNA chips to experiment on Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The DNA microarrays experimented with the gene expression and its temporal program alongside metabolic shifts to respiration from fermentation. Saccharomyces cerevisiae is one of the yeast species. The biochips also identified genes that suffered overexpression or deletion of their expression. Yeasts have a natural cycle that shifts from fermentation (anaerobic) to respiration (aerobic) metabolism. Inoculating yeast into a sugary solution leads to fermentation which produces ethanol (Tekarslan-Sahin et al., 2018). Yeast cells that have changed into ethanol form the basis for aerobic respiration after the depletion of fermentable sugar. The diauxic shift is the switch to aerobic respiration from anaerobic growth after the exhaustion of glucose. These changes relate to gene expressions that are key to vital cellular processes like the storage of carbohydrates, synthesis of proteins, and metabolism of carbon. The researchers characterized gene expression changes that happen during the Diauxic shift using DNA microarrays. The biochips also investigated the genetic circuitry that regulated and executed the program

The experiment

The DNA microarrays contained around six thousand and four hundred different DNA sequences. The researchers selected yeast cells that were actively growing and adding them to a fresh medium for twenty-one hours at thirty degrees Celsius. Nine hours later, after the initial growth, the investigators harvested seven samples separately after intervals of two hours each and isolated ten messenger RNAs. The scrutinizers used reverse transcription to prepare complementary DNA. The catalysts to the experiment were dUTP (deoxyuridine triphosphate) which was either Cy5 labeled red or Cy3 labeled green hybridized into the microarray. The researchers labeled the complementary DNA collected at each successive interval as Cy5, and the DNA collected immediately after the inoculation as "reference" to maximize changes in expression levels. The pattern of gene expression changed as the glucose was exhausted during the analysis. The levels of messenger RNA for about seven hundred and ten genes produced twice as many genes and the messenger levels for the one thousand and thirty genes reduced by about half of the gene levels. The levels of 183 mDNA genes increased by four times while the mDNA levels for the two hundred and three genes reduced by four times. Gene expression with known functions indicates the adaptation of cells to different environments.  

Hypothesis

The yeast cells shift from anaerobic respiration to aerobic respiration as the fermentable sugars deplete.

General finding

Large gene-related functionalities provide insights into how yeast cells adapt systematically to changing environments just as gene expressions show insights into metabolic reprogramming. Vastly altered gene expressions highlighted the challenges in comprehending the current regulatory mechanism. Few cases of the experiment had discrepancies while the gene expression changes in diauxic shifts integrated much information about the cell's metabolic state and its nutritional state and were very complex. The microarrays allowed the researchers to monitor expressions in most genes under the experiment's condition. While DNA microarrays characterized the mutations' transcriptional consequences, they affected the activities of regulatory molecules. The microarrays enable scientists to monitor patterns of gene expressions on a genomic scale (Manry et al., 2017). Simple biological experiments produce a lot of information about genes and their complexity. The scholars amplified more than six thousand genes in four months, and within a couple of days, they required one hundred and ten microarrays to print each of the 6400 elements. The use of DNA microarrays in monitoring gene expressions is a practical application to the screening of drugs since mutations in some encoded genes may indicate whether the drug will surrogate as a modulator or a chemical inhibitor.