Oxygen radicals are important components of metazoan apoptosis. We have found that apoptosis can be induced in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae by depletion of glutathione or by low external doses of H2O2. Cycloheximide prevents apoptotic death revealing active participation of the cell. Yeast can also be triggered into apoptosis by a mutation in CDC48 or by expression of mammalian bax. In both cases, we show oxygen radicals to accumulate in the cell, whereas radical depletion or hypoxia prevents apoptosis. These results suggest that the generation of oxygen radicals is a key event in the ancestral apoptotic pathway and offer an explanation for the mechanism of bax-induced apoptosis in the absence of any established apoptotic gene in yeast.

Secretion of proteins is initiated by their uptake into the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), which possesses a proteolytic system able to degrade misfolded and nonassembled proteins. The ER degradation system was studied with yeast mutants defective in the breakdown of a mutated soluble vacuolar protein, carboxypeptidase yscY (CPY*). The ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme Ubc7p participated in the degradation process, which was mediated by the cytosolic 26S proteasome. It is likely that CPY* entered the ER, was glycosylated, and was then transported back out of the ER lumen to the cytoplasmic side of the organelle, where it was conjugated with ubiquitin and degraded.

Proteins enter the secretory pathway through the endoplasmic reticulum, which delivers properly folded proteins to their site of action and contains a quality-control system to monitor and prevent abnormal proteins from being delivered. Many of these proteins are degraded by the cytoplasmic proteasome, which requires their retrograde transport to the cytoplasm. Based on a co-immunoprecipitation of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I heavy-chain breakdown intermediates with the translocon subunit Sec61p, it was speculated that Sec61p maybe involved in retrograde transport. Here we present functional evidence from genetic studies that Sec61p mediates retrograde transport of a mutated lumenal yeast carboxypeptidase ycsY (CPY*) in vivo. The endoplasmic reticulum lumenal chaperone BiP (Kar2p) and Sec63p, which are also subunits of the import machinery, are involved in export of CPY* to the cytosol. Thus our results demonstrate that retrograde transport of proteins is mediated by a functional translocon. We consider the export of endoplasmic reticulum-localized proteins to the cytosol by the translocon for proteasome degradation to be a general process in eukaryotic cell biology.

The yeast Ca2+ adenosine triphosphatase Pmr1, located in medial-Golgi, has been implicated in intracellular transport of Ca2+ and Mn2+ ions. We show here that addition of Mn2+ greatly alleviates defects ofpmr1 mutants in N-linked and O-linked protein glycosylation. In contrast, accurate sorting of carboxypeptidase Y (CpY) to the vacuole requires a sufficient supply of intralumenal Ca2+. Most remarkably, pmr1 mutants are also unable to degrade CpY*, a misfolded soluble endoplasmic reticulum protein, and display phenotypes similar to mutants defective in the stress response to malfolded endoplasmic reticulum proteins. Growth inhibition of pmr1 mutants on Ca2+-deficient media is overcome by expression of other Ca2+ pumps, including a SERCA-type Ca2+ adenosine triphosphatase from rabbit, or by Vps10, a sorting receptor guiding non-native luminal proteins to the vacuole. Our analysis corroborates the dual function of Pmr1 in Ca2+ and Mn2+ transport and establishes a novel role of this secretory pathway pump in endoplasmic reticulum-associated processes.