Copper(II) Sulfate treatment with 10 mM for 2 h

The effect of the heavy metal copper on the expression of a wide spectrum of genes was analyzed by using a DNA microarray. Gene expression profile of baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae grown in a media containing sub-lethal concentration of cupric sulfate was compared with those of yeast grown in a normal media. Among about 6200 ORFs of yeast, 143 ORFs were induced more than two-fold to resist against copper toxicity after exposure to copper. As was expected, FRE1, FRE7, and CTR1, genes controlled by Mac1p, were strongly down-regulated. Copper metallothionein CUP1-1 and CUP1-2 were induced more than 20-fold. Some genes related to sulfur metabolism and oxidative stress response were also up-regulated. This DNA microarray technology indicated that plasma membrane, cell wall, protein, and DNA, were molecular targets of copper toxicity. Keywords: stress response Series containes 3 hybridization results from independent biological samples, and each experiment have high and low power scanned data respectively. However, the low data from array-1 and array-3 was eliminated because of the data quality (the data from array-1 with low power scanning was not submitted in this series, whereas that from array-3 was submitted).