Signaling and Adaptive Mechanisms in Yeasts

Glucose is the preferred carbon and energy source for most organisms and largely impacts many regulatory pathways in living cells. Although it is the most abundant monosaccharide on Earth, extracellular glucose concentrations fluctuate rapidly and most cells have to adapt to these variations in order to survive. The remarkable capacity of eukaryotic cells to optimize their metabolism in response to glucose availability requires glucose sensing systems and sophisticated signal transduction pathways. Yeasts share several evolutionary conserved cellular processes with higher eukaryotes. Since they display efficient genetic, molecular and genomic tools, they are powerful experimental models to study glucose sensing and signaling mechanisms in a living cell. The main objectives of the SAMY team (Signaling and Adaptive Mechanisms in Yeasts) are to understand how yeast cells sense glucose, to dissect glucose signaling pathways at the molecular level, and to elucidate how these transduction pathways influence glucose uptake.