Calcium and Cell Response to Heavy Metals: Can Yeast Provide an Answer?

Despite constant efforts to maintain a clean environment, heavy metal pollution contin - ues to raise challenges to the industrialized world. Exposure to heavy metals is detrimen tal to living organisms, and it is of utmost importance that cells find rapid and efficient ways to respond to and eventually adapt to surplus metals for survival under severe stress. This chapter focuses on the attempts done so far to elucidate the calcium-mediated response to heavy metal stress using the model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae . The possibilities to record the transient elevations of calcium within yeast cells concomitantly with the heavy metal exposure are presented, and the limitations imposed by interfer ence between calcium and heavy metals are discussed. Ca 2+ influx and mating.