Trehalose is required for stress tolerance and regulation of glucose uptake. Trehalose-6-phosphate synthase enzyme, encoded by TPS1, is the first enzyme in trehalose biosynthetic pathway. The neutral trehalase enzyme, encoded by NTH1 gene, is responsible from the hydrolysis of stress accumulated trehalose in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. It is known that promoter regions of transcriptionally active genes are cleared by chromatin modifying complexes to provide access to transcription initiation complex. In this study, we have analyzed if the chromatin modifying complexes involves in the transcription of NTH1 and TPS1 genes under normal and stress inducing growth conditions. We tested the effect of Snf2p, catalytic subunit of SWI/SNF complex, on the transcriptional regulation of NTH1 and TPS1. We have found that NTH1 gene expressions in Δsnf2 mutants were 3-fold higher than wild type yeast strain, but TPS1 gene expression in Δsnf2 mutants didn’t differ from wild type yeast strain. The nitrogen starvation triggered only NTH1 gene expression in wild type yeast cells but no change was observed in Δsnf2 mutants and TPS1 gene expression. Our results indicated that SWI/SNF chromatin remodeling complex is essential for the transcriptional repression of NTH1 gene, but not TPS1 gene.
