Dimethylsulfoxide treatment with 10 % for 2 h

The number and type of synthetic chemicals that are being produced worldwide continues to increase significantly. While these industrial chemicals provide numerous benefits, there is no doubt that some have potential to damage the environment and health. Toxicity must be evaluated and use must be carefully controlled and monitored in order to minimize potential damage. DNA microarray technology has become an important new technique in toxicology. We are using the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model organism for toxicological study because it is a simple, fast-growing eukaryote that has been thoroughly characterized. In order to evaluate toxicity by newly synthesized or mixture chemicals, toxicity-induced gene expression alteration profiles by known chemicals should be collected. In our study, cells need to be exposed with same experimental cellular condition, semi lethal (IC50), respectively. In the case of Dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO) (CAS; 67-68-5), the exposure dose was decided as 10 % by growth curve with continuously diluted exposure. Me2SO (DMSO) is a polar solvent that is widely used in biochemistry, pharmacology, and industry. Although there are several reports in the literature concerning the biological effects of Me2SO, the total cellular response remains unclear. In this paper, DNA microarray technology combined with the hierarchical clustering bioinformatics tool was used to assess the effects of Me2SO on yeast cells. We found that yeast exposed to Me2SO increased phospholipid biosynthesis through up-regulated gene expression. It was confirmed by Northern blotting that the level of INO1 and OPI3 gene transcripts, encoding key enzymes in phospholipid biosynthesis, were significantly elevated following treatment with Me2SO. Furthermore, the phospholipid content of the cells increased during exposure to Me2SO as shown by conspicuous incorporation of a lipophilic fluorescent dye (3,3'-dihexyloxacarbocyanine iodide) into the cell membranes. From these results we propose that Me2SO treatment induces membrane proliferation in yeast cells to alleviate the adverse affects of this chemical on membrane integrity. Keywords: stress response Series contains 6 hybridization results from independent biological samples respectively.