The vacuolar compartment is required for sulfur amino acid homeostasis in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

In order to isolate new mutations impairing transcriptional regulation of sulfur metabolism in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, we used a potent genetic screen based on a gene fusion expressing XylE (from Pseudomonas putida) under the control of the promoter region of MET25. This selection yielded strains mutated in various different genes. We describe in this paper the properties of one of them, MET27. Mutation or disruption of MET27 leads to a methionine requirement and affects S-adenosylmethionine (AdoMet)-mediated transcriptional control of genes involved in sulfur metabolism. The cloning and sequencing of MET27 showed that it is identical to VPS33. Disruptions or mutations of gene VPS33 are well known to impair the biogenesis and inheritance of the vacuolar compartment. However, the methionine requirement of vps33 mutants has not been reported previously. We show here, moreover, that other vps mutants of class C (no apparent vacuoles) also require methionine for growth. Northern blotting experiments revealed that the met27-1 mutation delayed derepression of the transcription of genes involved in sulfur metabolism. By contrast, this delay was not observed in a met27 disrupted strain. Physiological and morphological analyses of met27-1 and met27 disrupted strains showed that these results could be explained by alterations in the ability of the vacuole to transport or store AdoMet, the physiological effector of the transcriptional regulation of sulfur metabolism.