Extracellular calcium triggers unique transcriptional programs and modulates staurosporine-induced cell death in Neurospora crassa
Authors:A. Pedro Gonçalves1,2, João Monteiro2, Chiara Lucchi2, David J. Kowbel3, J. Miguel Cordeiro1,4, Paulo Correia-de-Sá1,4, Daniel J. Rigden5, N. Louise Glass3, Arnaldo Videira1,2
doi: 10.15698/mic2014.09.165
Volume 1, pp. 289 to 302, published 09/08/2014.
1 ICBAS-Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas de Abel Salazar, Universidade do Porto, Rua de Jorge Viterbo Ferreira 228, 4050-313 Porto, Portugal.
2 IBMC-Instituto de Biologia Molecular e Celular – Universidade do Porto, Rua do Campo Alegre 823, 4150-180 Porto, Portugal.
3 Plant and Microbial Biology Department, The University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
4 UMIB-Unidade Multidisciplinar de Investigação Biomédica, Universidade do Porto, Rua de Jorge Viterbo Ferreira 228, 4050-313 Porto, Portugal.
5 Institute of Integrative Biology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 7ZB, United Kingdom.
Keywords:
calcium, cell death, ROS, Ca2+-binding motif, Neurospora crassa.
Corresponding Author(s):
Conflict of interest statement:
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Please cite this article as:
A. Pedro Gonçalves, João Monteiro, Chiara Lucchi, David J. Kowbel, J. Miguel Cordeiro, Paulo Correia-de-Sá, Daniel J. Rigden, N. Louise Glass, Arnaldo Videira (2014). Extracellular calcium triggers unique transcriptional programs and modulates staurosporine-induced cell death in Neurospora crassa. Microbial Cell 1(9): 289-302.
© 2014 Gonçalves 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:
Alterations in the intracellular levels of calcium are a common response to cell death stimuli in animals and fungi and, particularly, in the Neurospora crassa response to staurosporine. We highlight the importance of the extracellular availability of Ca2+ for this response. Limitation of the ion in the culture medium further sensitizes cells to the drug and results in increased accumulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS). Conversely, an approximately 30-fold excess of external Ca2+ leads to increased drug tolerance and lower ROS generation. In line with this, distinct staurosporine-induced cytosolic Ca2+ signaling profiles were observed in the absence or presence of excessive external Ca2+. High-throughput RNA sequencing revealed that different concentrations of extracellular Ca2+ define distinct transcriptional programs. Our transcriptional profiling also pointed to two putative novel Ca2+-binding proteins, encoded by the NCU08524 and NCU06607 genes, and provides a reference dataset for future investigations on the role of Ca2+ in fungal biology.