Depletion of arginine in yeast cells decreases the resistance to hydrostatic pressure

High hydrostatic pressure (HP) inhibits growth and inactivates microorganisms by destabilizing non-covalent molecular interactions. Arginine contributes to stress resistance because it has a guanidine side chain, which assists in the refolding of aggregated proteins. We attempted to analyze the contribution of arginine to high HP stress using a pressure-sensitive mutant strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and a metabolomics approach. Our results showed that the content of 136 out of 250 detected metabolites differed in the mutant and parent strains. Decreased metabolites were involved in the tricarboxylic acid cycle and arginine biosynthesis. The expression of genes contributing to arginine biosynthesis was significantly lower in the mutant strain than in the parent strain. When arginine was supplemented to the medium, the mutant strain showed more tolerance to pressure. These results suggest that yeast cells survived due to the contribution of arginine to high pressure resistance. This indicates that depletion of arginine caused by decreased activity of the biosynthesis pathway confers sensitivity to HP.