Environmental monitoring by use of genomics and metabolomics technologies

Abstract

The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is one of the most characterized eucaryotes and its complete genome sequence was published in 1986. Thus, this organism is a good candidate for biological environmental monitoring. Omics (genomics, metabolomics) technology is being applied to environmental monitoring using yeast cells. For genomics studies, commercially available DNA microarrays are used and selected the highly induced genes by the cadmium treatment. The functional characterization of induced genes by cadmium stress suggests the accumulation of glutathione, as the almost all genes contributing sulfur amino acid biosynthesis are significantly induced. For metabolomics studies, capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry (CE-MS) is used for the separation and identification of metabolites. The metabolomics results suggest the accumulation of glutathione. This strongly agrees with the results obtained by genomics. However, the combined results found the negative biosynthesis of glycine. This proves that the accumulation of glutathione is not the reason to activated sulfur amino acid biosynthesis. By combining the genomic analysis with the metabolomic analysis, raise the possibility of discovering new mechanism that nobody has noticed until now. © 2009 Springer Netherlands.