Depolarization affects the lateral microdomain structure of yeast plasma membrane

Abstract

We report the transmembrane voltage-induced lateral reorganization of highly-ordered lipid microdomains in the plasma membrane of living Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Using trans-parinaric acid (all-trans-9,11,13,15-octadecatetraenoic acid) as a probe of lipid order and different methods of membrane depolarization, we found that depolarization always invokes a significant reduction in the amount of gel-like microdomains in the membrane. Different depolarization mechanisms, including the application of ionophores, cell depolarization by an external electric field, depolarization by proton/hexose co-transport facilitated by HUP1 protein and a reduction of membrane potential caused by compromised respiration efficiency, yielded the same results independently of the yeast strain used. The data suggest that the voltage-induced reorganization of lateral membrane structure could play significant role in fast cellular response to acute stress conditions, as well as in other membrane microdomain-related regulatory mechanisms.

Fungal plasma membrane domains

“…A substrate-induced shift of the transporter to an IF state somehow abolishes this conditional trapping (loss of interaction with an MCC/eisosome protein and/or lipid) and transporter molecules now freely diffuse at the PM. This model is also compatible with the fact that the membrane potential (ΔΨ) is important for the MCC partitioning of Can1 (Grossmann et al 2007;Herman et al 2015). Can1, like all membrane proteins, is adapted to the ΔΨ and has an asymmetric distribution of polar residues, with negatively and positively charged residues being more abundant on the extracellular side and cytoplasmic sides of the membrane, respectively (Ghaddar et al 2014a).…”

“…Saturated sphingolipids are known to preferentially associate with ergosterol (Tanaka and Tani 2018), are present mostly in the outer leaflet of the PM and mainly organized in membrane domains by association with ergosterol and specific proteins. Fungal complex sphingolipids contribute to the formation of the highly ordered "gel-like" fungal membrane domain formation (Björkbom et al 2010;Aresta-Branco et al 2011;Vecer et al 2014;Herman et al 2015).…”

Changes in the Sterol Composition of the Plasma Membrane Affect Membrane Potential, Salt Tolerance and the Activity of Multidrug Resistance Pumps in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

“…To elucidate whether the accumulation of sterols differing from ergosterol in the plasma membrane of erg mutants affects the level of membrane potential, we used a diS-C 3 (3) assay [ 33 ]. This assay is based on a cationic potentiometric probe, which is able to sensitively reflect very fine changes in the plasma-membrane potential, such as those caused by membrane lateral microdomain structures [ 35 ] or by the altered transport activity of mutated versions of the Trk1 potassium uptake system [ 36 ]. According to the diS-C 3 (3) staining of cells, the erg mutants divided into three groups ( Fig 2A ).…”

Roles of pH in control of cell proliferation

“…It is therefore tempting to speculate that acid/base transport proteins may exert their effect on cell cycle progression by altering K + ‐channel activity and thus V m (Figure ). Interestingly, V m has been shown to play a significant role in organization of lipid microdomains, which, in turn, would affect signalling events related to such domains. Specifically, hyperpolarization of V m was shown to induce clustering of phosphatidylinositol 4,5‐biphosphate (PI(4,5)P 2 ) within the membrane.…”