Conventional and emerging roles of the energy sensor Snf1/AMPK in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Authors:

Paola Coccetti1,2, Raffaele Nicastro1,3 and Farida Tripodi1,2

doi: 10.15698/mic2018.11.655
Volume 5, pp. 482 to 494, published 29/09/2018.

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Affiliations:

1 Department of Biotechnology and Biosciences, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy.

2 SYSBIO, Centre of Systems Biology, Milan, Italy.

3 Present address: Department of Biology, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland.

Keywords: 

budding yeast, metabolism, stress response, aging, transcription, signaling, cell cycle, endocytosis, DNA damage, glucose repression

Corresponding Author(s):

Paola Coccetti, Department of Biotechnology and Biosciences, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy; paola.coccetti@unimib.it

Conflict of interest statement:

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Please cite this article as:

Paola Coccetti, Raffaele Nicastro and Farida Tripodi (2018). Conventional and emerging roles of the energy sensor Snf1/AMPK in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Microbial Cell: in press.

© 2018 Coccetti et al. This is an open-access article released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are acknowledged.

Abstract:

All proliferating cells need to match metabolism, growth and cell cycle progression with nutrient availability to guarantee cell viability in spite of a changing environment. In yeast, a signaling pathway centered on the effector kinase Snf1 is required to adapt to nutrient limitation and to utilize alternative carbon sources, such as sucrose and ethanol. Snf1 shares evolutionary conserved functions with the AMP-activated Kinase (AMPK) in higher eukaryotes which, activated by energy depletion, stimulates catabolic processes and, at the same time, inhibits anabolism. Although the yeast Snf1 is best known for its role in responding to a number of stress factors, in addition to glucose limitation, new unconventional roles of Snf1 have recently emerged, even in glucose repressing and unstressed conditions. Here, we review and integrate available data on conventional and non-conventional functions of Snf1 to better understand the complexity of cellular physiology which controls energy homeostasis.