Yeast cells reveal the misfolding and the cellular mislocalization of the human BRCA1 protein

Homo cerevisiae-Leveraging Yeast for Investigating Protein-Protein Interactions and Their Role in Human Disease

Understanding how genetic variation affects phenotypes represents a major challenge, particularly in the context of human disease. Although numerous disease-associated genes have been identified, the clinical significance of most human variants remains unknown. Despite unparalleled advances in genomics, functional assays often lack sufficient throughput, hindering efficient variant functionalization. There is a critical need for the development of more potent, high-throughput methods for characterizing human genetic variants. Here, we review how yeast helps tackle this challenge, both as a valuable model organism and as an experimental tool for investigating the molecular basis of phenotypic perturbation upon genetic variation. In systems biology, yeast has played a pivotal role as a highly scalable platform which has allowed us to gain extensive genetic and molecular knowledge, including the construction of comprehensive interactome maps at the proteome scale for various organisms. By leveraging interactome networks, one can view biology from a systems perspective, unravel the molecular mechanisms underlying genetic diseases, and identify therapeutic targets. The use of yeast to assess the molecular impacts of genetic variants, including those associated with viral interactions, cancer, and rare and complex diseases, has the potential to bridge the gap between genotype and phenotype, opening the door for precision medicine approaches and therapeutic development.

Modeling human disease in yeast: recreating the PI3K-PTEN-Akt signaling pathway in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a model organism that has been thoroughly exploited to understand the universal mechanisms that govern signaling pathways. Due to its ease of manipulation, humanized yeast models that successfully reproduce the function of human genes permit the development of highly efficient genetic approaches for molecular studies. Of special interest are those pathways related to human disease that are conserved from yeast to mammals. However, it is also possible to engineer yeast cells to implement functions that are naturally absent in fungi. Along the years, we have reconstructed several aspects of the mammalian phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K) pathway in S. cerevisiae. Here, we briefly review the use of S. cerevisiae as a tool to study human oncogenes and tumor suppressors, and we present an overview of the models applied to the study of the PI3K oncoproteins, the tumor suppressor PTEN, and the Akt protein kinase. We discuss the application of these models to study the basic functional properties of these signaling proteins, the functional assessment of their clinically relevant variants, and the design of feasible platforms for drug discovery.