Abstract
We evaluated the effects of dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) on yeast cells by taking advantage of DNA microarrays and bioinformatics tools such as cluster analysis. There were 147 induced and 246 repressed genes in the expression profiles of 5, 535 yeast genes by DNA microarray analysis. From the comparison of these expression profile changes in response to DMSO treatment with other publicly available expression data, the gene expression pattern of DMSO treatment resembled those of DTT and diamide. This suggests that DMSO causes damage similar to that caused by DTT and diamide. Further, DMSO inhibits protein folding and processing in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), cell wall damage can result from the formation of improper disulfide bonds in the ER. The genes expressed during the DMSO treatment were also grouped in the cluster including the nonfermentable carbon sources, such as ethanol and galactose, during the stationary phase. This suggests that DMSO induces glucose depletion or starvation in yeast cells accompanied by new energy synthesis via an unknown metabolic pathway that utilizes DMSO as a carbon source.
