Saccharomyces cerevisiae: A Platform for Structure-activity Relationship Analysis and High-throughput Candidate Prioritization

The budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been an invaluable model organism in contributing to the current understanding of cellular biology, owing mainly to its highly tractable genetic system and the completion of its genome sequencing in 1996. Indeed, these bolstered the development of novel methods that have provided great insights into genetic and protein networks in human cells. With the large collection of datasets, S. cerevisiae also became an ideal platform for investigating the mechanism of action of novel compounds. The first part of my thesis uses a validated chemogenomic assay to investigate the mechanism of action of structurally related novel DNA-damaging agents, delineating valuable structure-activity relationship in the process. The second part describes the development of a method that uses drug-induced wild-type growth dynamic to characterize novel compounds, which, in combination with the chemogenomic assay, may complement existing high throughput screening experiments to improve the current drug development process.MAS