ABSTRACT

Since the discovery of a yeast mutant showing diagnostic markers of early and late mammalian apoptosis twenty-five years ago, also cell death represents a key process that can be feasibly modeled in this unicellular eukaryotic organism. Indeed, cell death regulation is structurally and functionally conserved in yeast. This has completed, in a way, the research tool kit of this versatile model organism allowing investigating the molecular regulatory network governing eukaryotic cell fate decision in response to environmental cues. Environmental changes trigger intracellular stress responses, which may disturb mitochondrial structure and/or function. To maintain cell homeostasis, damaged mitochondria relay signals through retrograde (RTG), as opposed to anterograde, communication pathways that drive specific nuclear gene transcription patterns in response to stress. Here, I will present our studies on the characterization of regulated cell death pathways triggered by acetic acid (AA-RCD) in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is a bona fide yeast model of intrinsic mitochondrial pathway of mammalian apoptosis. This experimental model has been used to perform functional genomics studies together with differential proteomic and metabolomics analysis to understand the complexity of the pathways that mediate nucleus-cytosol-mitochondria communications through transcriptional regulation. This led to the identification of new regulators of RTG signaling and showed interactions among mitochondrial RTG signaling, carbon catabolite repression and high-osmolarity glycerol pathways in central carbon metabolism reprogramming. Finally, I will mention the use of our yeast model for functional genomics studies on BRCA2 oncosupressor and (+)RNA virus replicative proteins.

Short CV

Prof. Sergio Giannattasio has retired on August 2022 and is now Senior Associate Scientist at the Institute of Biomembranes, Bioenergetics and Molecular Biotechnologies (IBIOM) of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) in Bari (Italy), where he has been working for more than 40 years on mitochondria and their role in cell stress response.

He was visiting scientist at the Department of Molecular Biology, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, Texas, USA, in the laboratory of Ronald Butow and in other internationally renowned Universities in USA, Portugal and Switzerland.

His research interests focus on the biogenesis and function of mitochondria, nucleus-mitochondria crosstalk, particularly mitochondrial retrograde pathway, in cell stress response in yeast and mammalian cells, as well as the molecular basis of inherited diseases and metabolic reprogramming in cancer biology. He has been studying the oncosupressor BRCA2 and (+)RNA-virus replicase proteins in humanized yeast.

Recently, he has settled the Metabolomics facility within the “National Research Center for Bioinformatics and Omics Sciences ” (CNRBiOmics) of the Italian Node of ELIXIR research infrastructure.

115 articles on peer-reviewed journals and more than 130 congress proceedings vouch for his research activity (h-index 32).

Prof. Giannattasio was awarded with the National Scientific Qualification (ASN) as full professor in Applied Biology and in General Biochemistry. He is Professor of Chemistry and Molecular Biology at the School of Medicine of University of Bari.

He was Director of IBIOM from 2019 to 2021.

Prof. Giannattasio is Associate Editor of Frontiers in Oncology-Molecular and Cellular Oncology and member of the Editorial Board of FEMS Yeast Research, Microbial Cell and Research in Cell Biology.

He chaired the 9th and 12th International Meeting on Yeast Apoptosis (IMYA), in 2012 and 2017, respectively, and the Meeting “Cell Stress: Survival and Apoptosis” of the “Italian Association of Cell Biology and Differentiation” (ABCD) in 2016. He was a Member of the scientific committee of several international meeting on yeast genetics and molecular biology.