PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Violeta Zorraquino-Salvo
AU  - Semarhy Quinones-Soto
AU  - Minseung Kim
AU  - Navneet Rai
AU  - Ilias Tagkopoulos
TI  - Deciphering the genetic and transcriptional basis of cross-stress responses in <em>Escherichia coli</em> under complex evolutionary scenarios
AID  - 10.1101/010595
DP  - 2014 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 010595
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/10/22/010595.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/10/22/010595.full
AB  - A tantalizing question in microbial physiology is the inter-dependence and evolutionary potential of cellular stress response across multiple environmental dimensions. To address this question, we comprehensively characterized the cross-stress behavior of wild-type and evolved Escherichia coli populations in five abiotic stresses (n-butanol, osmotic, alkaline, acidic, and oxidative) by performing genome-scale genetic, transcriptional and growth profiling, thus identifying 18 cases of cross-stress protection and one case of cross-stress vulnerability. We identified 18 cases of cross-stress protection and one case of cross-stress vulnerability, along with core and stress-specific networks. We tested several hypotheses regarding the effect of the stress order, stress combinations, mutation reversal and varying environments to the evolution and final cellular fitness of the respective populations. Our results argue of a common systems-level core of the stress response with several crucial implicated pathways that include metal ion binding and glycolysis/gluconeogenesis that is further complemented by a stress-specific expression program.