Aneuploidy, referring here to genome contents characterized by abnormal numbers of chromosomes, has been associated with developmental defects, cancer, and adaptive evolution in experimental organisms1–9. However, it remains unresolved how aneuploidy impacts gene expression and whether aneuploidy could directly bring phenotypic variation and improved fitness over that of euploid counterparts. In this work, we designed a novel scheme to generate, through random meiotic segregation, 38 stable and fully isogenic aneuploid yeast strains with distinct karyotypes and genome contents between 1N and 3N without involving any genetic selection. Through phenotypic profiling under various growth conditions or in the presence of a panel of chemotherapeutic or antifungal drugs, we found that aneuploid strains exhibited diverse growth phenotypes, and some aneuploid strains grew better than euploid control strains under conditions suboptimal for the latter. Using quantitative mass spectrometry-based proteomics, we show that the levels of protein expression largely scale with chromosome copy numbers, following the same trend observed for the transcriptome. These results provide strong evidence that aneuploidy directly impacts gene expression at both the transcriptome and proteome levels and can generate significant phenotypic variation that could bring about fitness gains under diverse conditions. Our findings suggest that the fitness ranking between euploid and aneuploid cells is context- and karyotype-dependent, providing the basis for the notion that aneuploidy can directly underlie phenotypic evolution and cellular adaptation.

Summary Differences in susceptibility to immune-mediated diseases are determined by variability in immune responses. In three studies within the Human Functional Genomics Project we assessed the effect of environmental and non-genetic host factors, of the genetic make-up of the host, and of the intestinal microbiome, on the cytokine responses in humans. We analyzed the association of these factors with circulating mediators and with six cytokines after stimulation with 19 bacterial, fungal, viral and non-microbial metabolic stimuli in 534 healthy subjects. In this first study we show a strong impact of non-genetic host factors (e.g. age and gender) on cytokine production and circulating mediators. Additionally, annual seasonality is found to be an important environmental factor influencing cytokine production. Alpha-1-antitrypsin concentrations partially mediate the seasonality of cytokine responses, whereas the effect of vitamin D levels is limited. The complete dataset has been made publicly available as a comprehensive resource for future studies.