Abstract
Budding yeast cells exist in two mating types, a and α, which use peptide pheromones to communicate with each other during mating. Mating depends on the ability of cells to polarize up pheromone gradients, but cells also respond to spatially uniform fields of pheromone by polarizing along a single axis. We used quantitative measurements of the response of a cells to α-factor to produce a predictive model of yeast polarization towards a pheromone gradient. We found that cells make a sharp transition between budding cycles and mating induced polarization and that they detect pheromone gradients accurately only over a narrow range of pheromone concentrations corresponding to this transition. We fit all the parameters of the mathematical model by using quantitative data on spontaneous polarization in uniform pheromone concentration. Once these parameters have been computed, and without any further fit, our model quantitatively predicts the yeast cell response to pheromone gradient providing an important step toward understanding how cells communicate with each other.
Highlights
Many events in plant and animal development depend on the ability of cells to interact with only one of many potential partners
Budding yeast cells exist in two mating types, a and α, which use peptide pheromones to communicate with each other during mating
Mating depends on the ability of cells to polarize up pheromone gradients, but cells respond to spatially uniform fields of pheromone by polarizing along a single axis
Summary
Many events in plant and animal development depend on the ability of cells to interact with only one of many potential partners. Examples include the interaction of neuronal growth cones with target cells [1], myotube fusion and vascular guidance [2, 3], the growth of pollen tubes to reach ovules [4], and the mating of many fungi, including budding yeast [5, 6]. These phenomena are based on the capacity of cells to polarize in response to spatially inhomogeneous external signals. The external signal is a pheromone gradient, which causes the cell to polarize its growth towards the source of pheromone produced by the mating partner, [6, 8,9,10]
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