The Transcriptional Response to Oxidative Stress is Independent of Stress-Granule Formation

We characterized oxidative-stress-induced transcriptional changes in Drosophila S2 cells and assessed how these were altered under conditions that disrupted stress granule (SG) assembly. Sodium-arsenite stress for 3 hours resulted predominantly in the induction or upregulation of stress-responsive mRNAs whose levels peaked during cell recovery after stress cessation. RNAi-mediated knock down of the conserved G3BP1/ Rasputin protein inhibited stress-granule assembly. However, this disruption had no significant effect on the stress-induced transcriptional response. RNASeq was performed on Poly(A) purified mRNA from S2 cells in triplicates for control, stress and recovery conditions. RNAi was used to knock down rasputin in S2 cells and poly(A) selected mRNA samples (Mock RNAi and Rin RNAi) were sequenced in triplicates for control, stress and recovery conditons.