Gene-Environment Interactions in Stress Response Contribute Additively to a Genotype-Environment Interaction

How combinations of gene-environment interactions collectively give rise to genotype-environment interactions is not fully understood. To shed light on this problem, we genetically dissected an environment-specific poor growth phenotype in a cross of two budding yeast strains. This phenotype is detectable when certain segregants are grown on ethanol at 37°C ('E37'), a condition that differs from the standard culturing environment in both its carbon source (ethanol as opposed to glucose) and temperature (37°C as opposed to 30°C). Using recurrent backcrossing with phenotypic selection, we identified 16 contributing loci. To examine how these loci interact with each other and the environment, we focused on a subset of four loci that together can lead to poor growth in E37. We measured the growth of all 16 haploid combinations of alleles at these loci in all four possible combinations of carbon source (ethanol or glucose) and temperature (30 or 37°C) in a nearly isogenic population. This revealed that the four loci act in an almost entirely additive manner in E37. However, we also found that these loci have weaker effects when only carbon source or temperature is altered, suggesting that their effect magnitudes depend on the severity of environmental perturbation. Consistent with such a possibility, cloning of three causal genes identified factors that have unrelated functions in stress response. Thus, our results indicate that polymorphisms in stress response can show effects that are intensified by environmental stress, thereby resulting in major genotype-environment interactions when multiple of these variants co-occur.