Regulation of protein synthesis during early limitation of Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Arsenate, a competitive inhibitor with phosphate in phosphorylation reactions, has been used to lower adenine and guanine nucleotide levels in Saccharomyces cerevisiae to study nucleotide effects on protein synthesis. By measuring polysome levels, we have shown that initiation of protein synthesis is much more sensitive than elongation or termination to inhibition when the ATP/ADP, GTP/GDP ratios are low. When the arsenate-phosphate molar ratio was 0.27, protein synthesis was inhibited by about 85% and the kinetics of polysome decay was similar to that observed with the initiation inhibitor, verrucarin-76, or with the protein synthesis initiation mutant, ts187, at the restrictive temperature. With this level of arsenate, the adenylate energy charge dropped from 0.9 to 0.7 and the ATP/ADP and GTP/GDP ratios dropped from 6 to 2. The observed correlations between nucleotide ratio changes and inhibition of protein synthesis suggest that the former may be a control signal for the latter. The significance of these in vivo correlations will have to be tested with an in vitro protein synthesizing system. Higher arsenate levels resulted in even lower ATP/ADP, GTP/GDP ratios and in a slower decay of polysomes, implying that, eventually, elongation (in addition to initiation) was being inhibited.