Prion switching in response to environmental stress

If you have had a hard day at work, you may change your eating habits, perhaps favoring comfort food, but you don't suddenly develop the ability to eat the plate and cutlery. A new paper, published in this week's issue of PLoS Biology, describes an evolutionary mechanism in yeast that allows cells to respond to environmental stress in novel ways, including digesting materials that they were previously unable to use - though admittedly, they aren't eating crockery just yet! The work shows that a protein-misfolding mechanism that can reveal hidden genetic variation is far more likely to be triggered when yeast is under environmental stress, and is therefore an evolutionary strategy to trigger rapid evolution.

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