Effect of Benzoic Acid on ATP Levels

SysMO is a European transnational funding and research initiative on "Systems Biology of Microorganisms".

The goal pursued by SysMO was to record and describe the dynamic molecular processes going on in unicellular microorganisms in a comprehensive way and to present these processes in the form of computerized mathematical models.

Systems biology will raise biomedical and biotechnological research to a new quality level and contribute markedly to progress in understanding. Pooling European research ...

MOSES (Micro Organism Systems biology: Energy and Saccharomyces cerevisiae) develops a new Systems Biology approach, which is called 'domino systems biology'. It uses this to unravel the role of cellular free energy ('ATP') in the control and regulation of cell function. MOSES operates though continuous iterations between partner groups through a new systems-biology driven data-management workflow. MOSES also tries to serve as a substrate for three or more other SYSMO programs.

This study aims to establish the optimum conditions and assay methods for measuring ATP levels

To see changes in ATP levels in cells with induced ABC transporters. Cells with Pdr12 pump by 10 mM benzoic acid are used.

ATP levels of cells stressed with higher concentrations of benzoic acid (30 mM and 50 mM).

Effect of benzoate treatment (high concentrations) on ATP levels and Pdr12 expression after pretreatment of cells with low concentrations of benzoic acid.

Cell survival was determined under different benzoic acid concentrations

We will compare two different procedures to extract ATP from yeast cells: Standard kit procedure (hot Tris/EDTA) and Serrano procedure (cold perchloric acid). In addition we have tested different condition as it turned out that some are important.

The kit is used for the quantitative detection of ATP in yeast cells by luciferase driven bioluminescence. ATP extraction is done by boiling cells in TE buffer.