Phenotypic suppression caused by resonance with light-dark cycles indicates the presence of a 24-hours oscillator in yeast and suggests a new role of intrinsically disordered protein regions as internal mediators

Abstract

The mutual interaction between environment and life is a main topic of biological sciences. An interesting aspect of this interaction is the existence of biological rhythms spanning all the levels of organisms from bacteria to humans. On the other hand, the existence of a coupling between external oscillatory stimuli and adaptation and evolution rate of biological systems is a still unexplored issue. Here we give the demonstration of a substantial increase of heritable phenotypic changes in yeast, an organism lacking a photoreception system, when growing at 12 h light/dark cycles, with respect to both stable dark (or light) or non-12 + 12 h cycling. The model system was a yeast strain lacking a gene whose product is at the crossroad of many different physiological regulations, so ruling out any simple explanation in terms of increase in reverse gene mutations. The abundance of intrinsically disordered protein regions (IDPRs) in both deleted gene product and in its vast ensemble of interactors supports the hypothesis that resonance with the environmental cycle might be mediated by intrinsic disorder-driven interactions of protein molecules. This result opens to the speculation of the effect of environment/biological resonance phenomena in evolution and of the role of protein intrinsically disordered regions as internal mediators.

Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma

Keywords:

• Oscillatory dynamics
• entrainment
• resonance
• Kluyveromyces lactis
• mutation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Sapienza Università di Roma (RP11715C541D4BFF and RP11816418C88AAC).Author contributions: IC, AG and MMB designed the research; IC performed research; IC, AD, AG, VNU and MMB analyzed data; AD, AG, VNU and MMB wrote the paper; MMB supervised the project. We thank Dr. Michele Potenza for technical contribution. Funding source was not involved in analysis and interpretation of data, writing of the report and in the decision to submit the article for publication.