Analysis of a deletion library screen of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae using Gene Ontology, protein-protein interaction, and metabolic pathway data

Abstract

Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker's yeast) is a commonly used eukaryotic model organism particularly suited to genomic and metabolic study. We hope to identify genes novel to sulfur and nitrogen metabolism. In previous experiments from this lab, a gene deletion library of 5,132 yeast strains was screened to identify genes necessary for growth in the absence of sulfur or nitrogen. If a gene were deleted and no growth were observed, this gene was determined to be important for allowing proliferation in the nutrient-limited environments and flagged as a hit. In this project, a one way ANOVA test was performed on the screen using R using the BiocManager library and limma package. The results of the ANOVA test were joined in MySQL with Gene Ontology (FuncAssociate), protein-protein interaction (InterPro), and metabolic/signaling pathway (KEGG) data obtained from Ensembl. Here we use analysis of these three types of data to distinguish common themes among the genes identified as hits.