Identification of Candida tropicalis HSR I, a gene of the heat-shock factor-related family, which confers salt tolerance in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

A genomic library of Candida tropicalis in a yeast multicopy plasmid has be en screened for clones conferring salt tolerance upon transformation into S . cerevisiae. The best halotolerance clone contained an open reading frame encoding a predicted protein of 728 amino acids with homology to transcript ion factors of the heat-shock family. This novel gene was named HSR1 and is present in single copy in the C. tropicalis genome, Upon transformation in to S. cerevisiae it increases the expression of ENA1, a major determinant o f salt tolerance encoding a cation-extrusion pump. The sequence of CtHSR1 h as been deposited in the EMBL data library under Accession No. AJ296093. Co pyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.