UPR deficiency leads to poor growth, aneuploidy, and a trade-off between ER and general proteostasis in yeast

The unfolded protein response (UPR) was discovered in budding yeast as a mechanism that allows cells to adapt to endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stressors. Although the UPR is not thought to be necessary for cellular fitness of wild-type cells in the absence of stress, we found that UPR deficiency led to poor growth in cycling mitotic yeast cells. This led to pervasive adaptive aneuploidy of specific chromosomes that was seen in divergent strain backgrounds, indicating an important basal role for this pathway that was missed by studies of the most common laboratory-derived strains. Aneuploid UPR-deficient cells grew better than euploid UPR-deficient cells but exhibited heightened general proteostatic stress, a hallmark of aneuploidy in wild-type cells. Modulation of key genes involved in ER proteostasis that were encoded on aneuploid chromosomes could phenocopy the effects of aneuploidy, indicating that the reason UPR-deficient cells become aneuploid is to counteract protein folding stress in the ER. Proteomic analyses indicate that expression of a small subset of stress-induced UPR targets is supported by basal UPR activity, including the chaperone Kar2/BiP. Together, our results reveal an unexpected role for the UPR in baseline ER folding that is important enough to safeguard cellular fitness that cells tolerate the substantial proteostatic costs that result from aneuploidy to counteract its loss.