Hydrogen Peroxide-Induced Gene Expression across Kingdoms: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

Cells react to oxidative stress conditions by launching a defense response through the induction of nuclear gene expression. The advent of microarray technologies allowed monitoring oxidative stress dependent changes transcript levels in a comprehensive and genome-wide scale, resulting in a series of inventories of differentially expressed genes in different organisms. We performed a meta-analysis of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2)-induced gene expression in the cyanobacterium Synechocystis PCC6803, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Schizosaccharomyces pombe, the land plant Arabidopsis thaliana and the human HeLa cell line. We could demonstrate that H2O2-induced gene expression in both yeast species is highly conserved and is more similar to the response of Arabidopsis than that of the HeLa cell line. Based on the expression characteristics of genuine antioxidant genes, we show that the antioxidant capacity of microorganisms and higher eukaryotes is differentially regulated. We could identify four families of evolutionary conserved eukaryotic proteins that are responsive to H2O2: DnaJ domain-containing heat shock proteins, small GTP-binding proteins, protein kinases, and ubiquitin-conjugating enzymes.

Supplementary Data

This website provides the utility to query your sequence against our dataset (All the genes from 7 organisms: Synechocystis PCC6803, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Schizosaccharomyces pombe, Homo sapiens, Mus Musculus, Arabidopsis thaliana and Oryza sativa). You can also perform a search based on keywords or on gene ID. The outcome shows for your query the respective Gene Family (Tribe-MCL Clustering), Phylogenetic Profile and H2O2-Response Matrix (HRM).