There are different definitions of the word stress, and different kinds of stress that may occure on or within the human body. It would be interesting to know what kind of stress that the scientists subjected the yeast to, and what kinds of stimulai might cause that stress to a human cell.
Also, it would be interesting to know whether or not this kind of stress reaches the cells in reproductive organs.
Your genetic makeup may be “rewired” courtesy of stress.
University of California San Francisco said Tuesday that a team of scientists in the U.S., South Korea and Switzerland found that a complex network of 160,000 genetic interactions in yeast cells changes when subjected to stress.
Scientists found that this “rewiring” is extensive. In fact, 70 percent of the genetic interactions that happened when cells were under stress didn’t occur in normal cells.
This rewiring could be critical to study the biological responses to stress, UCSF said in a statement. The results could also apply to evaluating how cells deal with stress, disease, drugs and other issues. In a nutshell, a cell contains thousands of genes that talk to each other. This information exchange sheds light on how cells actually work. New tools such as DNA sequencing have given researchers more data on cell behavior.
The study, published in Science, was led by Nevan Krogan, PhD, an associate professor of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at UCSF, and Trey Ideker, PhD, chief of the Genetics Division at the UC San Diego School of Medicine. The team used a technique called “differential epistasis mapping” to develop an animated view of the rewiring inside cells. The team generated snapshots of 160,000 genetic interactions in yeast.
